


What Ails You

by Barkour



Series: Flash of Lightning, Break of Thunder [2]
Category: How to Train Your Dragon (Movies)
Genre: Gen, Mixed Canon, Politics, Unresolved Romantic Tension, War planning
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-22
Updated: 2017-11-22
Packaged: 2019-02-05 08:32:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 49,372
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12790734
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Barkour/pseuds/Barkour
Summary: In the wake of Dagur's attempt to make war on Berk, Hiccup heals from sickness, Astrid struggles with guilt, and the Berserkers uneasily accept a new chieftain.Sequel to Pox Dagura.





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> As with Pox Dagura, I wrote this in 2014. Hopefully posting this here will force me to finish it. Everything I noted on Pox Dagura applies here too. It isn't canon with the show, and I've taken enormous liberties with everything.
> 
> Hilariously (well, to me): I outlined this fic and the nebulous third piece in the series to include a romance between Heather and an original female character who would be Dagur's sister. Imagine how hard I laughed when I learned the Netflix show revealed Heather _is_ Dagur's sister. 
> 
> Well, this was already AU.

The chief had gone to the docks to help shore the boats, so Aghit was obliged to follow. She would rather she had no such obligation, but that was the way of chiefs, wasn’t it? They could do as they like and no thought spared for the healers who had to go stomping through the snow after them. Aghit muttered under her breath. The ice lashed her face. She’d told the chief twice to stay in bed, and where was the chief? At the docks. Well, Aghit wouldn’t be accountable for that. This new chief was clearly as mad as her brother.

The boats did need shoring. The Isle of Witsless sat on the northern end of the Archipelago Barbaric; only Freezing-To-Death topped her. The storm had only just begun to sweep across the southern rim of the archipelago. Witsless had dealt with it for the better part of the week. Now the bay was locking, the sea water at last cool enough for a crust of ice to form on top of it. Within the month the ice would thicken so that you could take a sled out on it and cross the bay from one end to the other. Any boats left in the water would be stuck there, and the water under the ice would get into the wood and then freeze, warping the wood as the ice expanded. The spring thaw would see the boats scuttled in the harbor.

This hardly necessitated the chief’s hands. Aghit hitched her skirt over her knees and took long, hopping steps through the snow piling on the pier. The persons at work on the boats were shadows in the gloom. The yellow light of their lamps, set on posts, caught on the falling snow. 

“Gerda!” Aghit shouted. “Ger _da_!” 

One of the shadows turned. Gerda had ropes wound about her long arms. Like the rest of the crew at work on this longship, she had her feet braced in the snow and she leaned backwards, heaving on the ropes.

“Aghit!” she said, surprised. “What are you out here for?”

If she’d anything at hand to throw, she would have thrown it. The chief was young, true, but youth was no excuse.

“What are _you_ out here for!”

“We have to get the boats in,” said Gerda.

Aghit jabbed her finger at the chief. “You have to get back inside!”

A man’s grip on his rope slipped. He slid in the snow, swearing, his feet skidding out from under him. Gerda snapped about again. Her shoulders tensed.

She said, “On my count! Three—”

Aghit threw her open palms to the heavens. O, Eir, give her the strength not to hit her chief over the head with a plank of wood. Sourly she thought that as head injuries had done little so far to restrict Gerda, then another would accomplish even less.

“Two—”

“When you’ve finished with the boats,” Aghit said, “you are to come to me right away.”

“One!” thundered Gerda, and their shadows undulated as they hauled on the ropes, dragging the longship onto the rocky shore, where the tidal mist had turned to frost and the way grown dark and slick.

Aghit retreated to the relative warmth of the healer’s hall, where she’d started a fire in the hearth before she set out to the chief’s house and from there to the docks. The fire had dwindled some in her long absence, and so she fed dry wood to it and stoked the flames with a heavy towel that she fanned before it. She had the hall to herself. The night, too. Yawning, Aghit fetched a heavy throw blanket and settled in a chair before the fire, tucking the blanket around her shoulders.

She had lapsed into a doze. Someone tapped her shoulder, and Aghit blinked. The small common room had heated. Gerda’s hand, thickly gloved, was cold. She smiled shyly at Aghit. 

“Here I am,” said Aghit’s chief. 

Aghit said, “So—so you are,” and her jaw popped as she yawned. She gripped Gerda’s arm and let the chief pull her upright. The small of her back had locked as she sat, and she thumped at it. Aghit gestured to the chair.

Gerda gathered the blanket before she sat; she folded it quickly in half then in half again, and she laid it over the chair’s arm. Aghit, resigned to the ache in her back, busied.

“At least you put a hat over it.”

“I’m sorry.” She smiled clumsily again.

Aghit dropped the hat on the hot bricks before the fire so it might dry and turned back to Gerda. The bandage was secured at her crown. Unfixing the pin, Aghit peeled the long wrap away. Gerda’s coarse, red hair was cropped close to her skull; the injury had required Aghit cut it. 

The flesh beneath the bandage was still red, furiously so, the crumpled scar that had taken the place of her right eye a knot of inflamed tissue. The blow had buckled her cheekbone, leaving her face recessed beneath the sealed eye socket, where the bone had mended poorly. Aghit studied the new skin for sign of infection.

“How’s your vision?” 

Gerda folded her large hands together in her lap. “It’s still strange.” 

Gerda spoke softly. Comical, from someone with so rough a voice, but Aghit did not laugh. Aghit consulted the wooden bottles shelved in the cupboards left of the hearth. Half the labels were still in the old master’s hand. She slipped a particular salve out; that label was in her own handwriting, and the smell of it, so freshly made, potent.

“You aren’t doing anything too strenuous?”

The chief was suitably abashed. Her eye dropped. Again she said, “I’m sorry.”

“Well, you shouldn’t have done that either,” said Aghit crisply. She popped the lid. The bitter scent sharpened. “But I meant with your eye.”

“Oh,” said Gerda. “No. I don’t think so. It’s only trouble if I look at something up close.”

She allowed Aghit to apply the salve to the cloven side of her face. Her gaze remained downcast. Her wide shoulders pinched in, as though she meant to make her self smaller. All of the comfortable strength she’d shown on the dock had gone out of her. Aghit could frown all she liked, with Gerda looking down at her hands as she did. She straightened her mouth.

“Tip your head back.” 

Gerda obeyed. She had never been a pretty girl, not like her mother, Gunnvor, but she had used to have a healthy firmness to her features that made it easy to think her handsome. Well, a chief didn’t need to be beautiful. Aghit dipped her thumb in the salve and bent to rub it into the runnel that folded Gerda’s cheek. The skin there was especially sensitive. Gerda drew a breath in through her nose; that, Aghit had managed to reset. She finished with Gerda’s cheek.

“Did you get the boats grounded?”

“Yes, all of them,” Gerda said. “Stone got in late.” She frowned. Before, it would have looked puppyish on her.

“Bad news,” Aghit surmised.

“No news,” Gerda corrected. “There’s no sign of any of them.”

“Well,” said Aghit. She ran the side of her thumb along Gerda’s eyebrow, cleaning the leftover salve from it. “Ships do go missing at sea.”

“Not three like this.”

“It does happen,” said Aghit. She fixed the lid to the jar and put it in the cupboard. “It’s happened before. Your father lost half the fleet once to a summer’s storm.”

“It’s winter,” said Gerda, not dryly. She sounded perplexed.

Closing that cupboard, Aghit crossed before the hearth to the cupboard on the right of the fireplace. Spare linens and clean cloths were folded neatly on those shelves.

“Worry less about those ships,” said Aghit, “and about listening to your healer’s professional medical opinion. I told you to stay inside this week. No more pushing it. You have a fever again.”

“I wanted to help,” Gerda argued. “And we need them to see that I’m all right.”

Aghit unwound the fresh bandage and began wrapping Gerda’s head again. She held the one end to the base of Gerda’s skull with two fingers, and she drew the cloth tightly over them when she passed it along the back, till she thought the end secure.

“If you keep pushing it, they’re going to see that you aren’t all right. You can’t afford that,” Aghit said. 

She knew Gerda thought then of what no one could confirm, whether the clan Arrson had acted alone or if they’d co-conspirators among the other clans of Witsless. Most of the men who had attempted the coup had died that day or shortly after, in the punitive frenzy. The clan’s heir had sworn ignorance. He continued to swear it from his cell. The Arrson’s new heir, a second cousin suddenly elevated, was so profusely grateful to the chief for her new position that no one could doubt her ignorance. 

“Better to delegate from the great hall, like a chief is supposed to,” Aghit went on. “It’s what your father did. You don’t think any of the other chiefs are running around in the snow pulling boats up. Bend your head.”

Gerda tucked her chin. Aghit wove the clasp through the outside end of the bandage, pinning it. As Aghit turned to check Gerda’s hat, Gerda straightened. Briefly she touched the cloth that swaddled half her face. She’d a faraway look again. These strange looks predated the attack. Nevertheless Aghit felt her heart tighten a moment. She’d seen what a serious blow to the head could do to a person. Aghit shook the hat. It was yet damp. She wouldn’t send her chief back out into the snow with a wet hat. 

Aghit left Gerda in her chair before the fire. The rest of the small hall’s rooms were dark. Since the old master had passed last winter, and the apprentices long since married out or gone elsewhere, Aghit had lived alone in the hall. She ought to have taken an apprentice her self years ago. She used her own room now largely for sleeping and for storage. The hats were in a box at the foot of the bed. She took a scarf, too.

Gerda looked up at Aghit’s approach. Her eye had cleared. She’d the appearance of a meek child. 

“Bundle up,” Aghit said, giving her both the hat and the scarf. “If the fever’s still there in the morning, I’ll make you something to bring it down. And stay inside, will you!”

“I will,” Gerda said sincerely. “Thank you.”

She tucked the scarf’s tail into her coat. The hat almost didn’t fit her. Aghit trailed the chief to the door, feeling as though there was more she ought to say. She had apprenticed to the old master when she was twelve, and so she had been present for the birth of Dagur and, four years later, the birth of Gerda. Gunnvor had prayed for a daughter and finally the gods had given her Gerda, but they took Gunnvor in trade. She’d lingered months before the fever saw to it. Oswald had kept the chief’s hall brightly lit at all hours, as if Hel could be kept away through good cheer. 

“Don’t worry so much,” Gunnvor had scolded the old master. “Women survive this every year. Now let me up.” She made it through autumn but not winter.

At the funeral Dagur had asked if they could put Gerda in the ground and take Gunnvor out. Then Mother could go home with them. Aghit, near twenty then and sick with grief her self, had held Gerda through the rites. When Dagur said this, she stared at him. The babe was smiling in her arms and reaching for Aghit’s braids.

“No,” Oswald had said, “we can’t do that.” He clapped his small son’s shoulder and then gripped Dagur tightly, as if the boy were an anchor. “But it will be all right. It will be all right.”

You were such a laughing babe, Aghit thought as she looked at Gerda, ready to go back into the storm. Aghit crossed her arms beneath her breasts.

“Think of where you want your chieftain’s tattoo,” she said. “We’ve put it off too long. In the spring, I think.”

Gerda paused, her hand on the latch. “Not on my face?” She touched her thumb to the bandage, where it covered her jaw.

“Don’t be smart,” said Aghit, and Gerda smiled. Then the smile faded some and Gerda brushed at her jaw, as if to sweep away the hair she no longer had. She’d a nervous habit as a girl of letting her hair fall in front of her face.

“I don’t want you to be upset,” Gerda said, “and I know that you were only worried. But I can’t afford them to see you telling me to get back in bed because I’m not well.”

“Stay in bed and I won’t have to.”

“Aghit,” said Gerda.

She was right, of course. Aghit tapped two of her fingers on her arm and said, “Aye, chief.”

“Thank you, Aghit,” said Gerda, and she smiled again.

Alone in the healer’s hall, Aghit contemplated the fire. Twice more she tapped her arm, then a third time. The fire needed feeding before she went to bed. The old master had used to read fortunes in the flames, fed by a particular sweet-smelling wood, but Aghit had no gift for sooth-saying and the wood she kept in the hall was just wood. She was thinking of those three ships. She’d spoken truly to the chief; there was no reason to suspect the worst of it. Two of the lost longships had gone on deep sea fishing expeditions. It was the third that worried Aghit. That one they had sent to the Outcasts with wool goods and food stores for winter, as recompense for the trouble Witsless had caused Alvin.

Aghit fed the fire. The smoke puffed out the chimney. She stood and took up the throw blanket. Her back was troubling her. Aghit pounded it with the flat of her hand as she went to her bed. Tomorrow she’d see if she couldn’t get one of the docks men to help her move her bed to the common room, so she could sleep in front of the fire rather than in her dark room, with the door left open.

As Aghit was going to bed, the man in the cell was waking up. He woke often in the night, and violently. The dark pressed on him. The dark always pressed on him. His cell had no windows; it was built into the earth. He had wrapped him self in the same blanket he had used for the last month, as he slowly wasted. The cold was worse than the dark. He’d thought he’d adjusted to both but it was clear to him then that he had adjusted to neither. He thought he would die soon and it was clear to him then that he was right about this. His head was very hot, and in the absolute darkness of his cell he saw strange things moving.

The coup had been his father’s idea. Everyone knew Gerda was a dullard. It was why her father had suffered her to journey at sea with the fishing crews. Dagur would have led the Berserkers to greatness, but his younger sister lacked even the charisma that had permitted Oswald to sell peace to the tribe. 

His father assured him it would be easy enough. The other clan heads would support them. This support had not materialized when the Arrsons moved; the other clan heads had either gathered around Gerda or scattered like chaff. In the chaos Gerda had proved proficient with the atgeir, some talent she’d hidden through her long sea travels. Even an idiot could master one thing, his father had said. Well, his father had mastered the downfall of their clan. Weeks ago, when his jailors still visited him, he had thought bitterly what a fool he’d been to listen to his father.

Now, if he thought of anything, he thought of how he wished his cell had a window, that he could see Dagur’s return. The shadows moving in the blackness had told him that Dagur would reclaim his throne. The Outcasts could not keep him, any more than the ice could keep a Skrill for ever. So if the coup had failed their goal would still be realized in the fullness of time. Gerda would not hold what was owed Dagur. In the grip of fever the once heir of the Arrson clan dreamed of a great fire that swept across the archipelago, consuming in it the Outcasts, the Hooligans, Meatheads, all. All the tribes had belonged to a single tribe once. They would be united again.

The fever was strong, and his jailors had broken several of his ribs; his nose as well. He had aspirated blood into his lungs during the last beating, blood and wet soil from the guard’s fist. He was dead long before the Skrill returned to Witsless. When the news came to the Arrson hall of his passing, the second cousin cried, for she had never thought she could hope to be named head of the clan unless she killed the heir with her own hands. She had a marked distaste for bloodshed, and she could hardly have arranged it better her self.

At sea some days south of Witsless the three missing longships and one of the two vessels Dagur had taken from the Outcasts smoldered. The sailors were boarding the smaller rowboats, to converge on the one longship not yet touched by flames; all the sailors excepting the men on the flagship. The blizzard obscured the night, and the wind tore sound away, so that to the flagship’s men it seemed as if they were alone in the world, that they were the only people living. 

The bearded man had gone into the hold after the blonde dragon rider had rescued her chief’s son. He’d smelled the rot at the top. Halfway down the steps he had seen what remained of Dagur. The blood had spurted from his neck. Still fresh, the pool was too warm for snow. The flakes blown down the steps melted where they stuck to Dagur’s blood. The dragon was as dead, its neck half-cleaved, the wound jagged. The hold stank like a gutted fish left out in the sun. The kitten hadn’t done this. That girl with the axe, he thought. The lamp had tipped over and the wall burned, thick smoke filling the hold as the more of the wood caught fire. Too much blood and waste for the whole of the hold to burn.

He rejoined the others on the deck. The wind had turned. Distantly they heard shouting. Another ship’s sail had gone up like a torch, and in its shivering light, as the snow whirled, men moved like shadows, or black ants.

“We could gather with the others,” said one man quietly. 

“What’s the use?” said the bearded man. He laughed. 

The sailors the dragon rider had bound had got free. A man in the rigging had waited till she’d strapped her axe to the beast and they’d flung their selves into the storm to climb bedecks and cut the ropes. Only a coward would have hid in the rigs. The bearded man thought it too late to scold him for it.

“We don’t have to die here,” someone else snarled. 

It wasn’t the bearded man who spoke then but the man who had gone with him to catch the kitten for their chief. “Well, we’re going to,” he said. 

The man who’d suggested gathering moved. The bearded man caught him around the throat before he had taken more than two uneven steps across the icing deck, toward the rail where the rowboat was tied. He held this man tenderly, as he might a lover, with his arm wrapped about the man’s neck, crushing.

“We’re all staying right here,” said the bearded man, and he tightened his grip till the man had stopped kicking.

“The chief—”

The bearded man let the dead man fall. 

“The chief’s dead,” he said. 

The deck of that other ship, so far from them, lit with spreading fire. Neither snow nor ice dampened it; the wind stoked the flames higher. The crumbling mast showed in silhouette, a skeleton pocked. The sailors out there would go—where? To Witsless, perhaps. The bearded man thought they might risk disease, to send someone over for the chief. 

Stepping over the dead man, the bearded man crossed to the railing. He drew the knife out of his belt.

“What are you doing?”

“We can’t leave, pups,” he said pleasantly. He looked over his shoulder at them, all of them, the few sailors left to man the flagship, chosen because they like Dagur had come out of the Outcasts’ prison with their skin peeling and their fevers high. “Not lest you want the same thing to happen to Witsless happened to Alvin.”

The ropes cut easily. As the rowboat plummeted to the sea, someone groaned, but no one rushed him; no sailor leapt over the railing, in the hope of reaching the boat. He left the knife buried in the wood and turned toward the steps leading to the hold. A shape of fire flickered in the stairwell. Stripping out of his wet coat, he pulled his topmost tunic off and wrapped the dryer cloth about his arm.

The tunic tindered. With his arm blazing, the bearded man emerged from the hold to walk the deck, swinging the tunic so it fell loosely and brushed fire. Here and there the deck began to catch. I should have kicked the kitten’s head in, he thought without real malice. 

“Well, we have a pyre,” the bearded man said, and he laughed again.

Two or three of the sailors did leap into the water after that, but the sea was no kinder to them than the smoke. The water pulled the breath out of them. One man got far enough out that he could turn in the water and see the flagship burning, its mast scorched, the Skrill on the flag swallowed by smoke and by ice. He got no farther. 

Elsewhere on the sea, a much smaller ship struggled to remain righted. Buffeted in the wind, unmoored on waves that rose and rose and then hung a moment, breathless, before swooping again, the vessel listed first port then starboard. Heather landed heavily on her shoulder against the wall, pushed off it, and continued to the steps. Here, sleet had only just begun to replace the snow.

The wind caught in her hood and ripped it away from her face. Fumbling to draw it over again, Heather held it with her arm bent before her face. The driving ice beat her cheeks. Long strands of her hair caught in her mouth.

Her mother was at the wheel, fighting the direction the ocean suggested. With the wind screaming, Heather had to shout to be heard.

“There’s an island west of here. We can land there and wait for the storm to pass.”

“The storm won’t pass,” her mother shouted. She’d given up on her keeping her own hood in place. It bobbled at her back. “If we land now we’ll be stuck in whatever harbor for months.”

Heather came to the other side of the wheel, before her mother. With her back to the wind, she was pushed painfully against the wheel’s casing. In the confines of the hood, sound distorted; the wind’s scream was a mournful howl. Heather grabbed on to a wheel spoke for balance and rubbed once at her mouth, pulling the hair from the corners.

“I’d rather be stranded on an island than dead in the ice! I want to go home too,” Heather said, “but this is reckless. Even if it weren’t storming we’re still days away from our island, and this one’s just a few hours west.”

“And what of the sheep?” her mother demanded. “The house?”

“They came with the island,” Heather said, clinging to the wheel as the wind battered her. “I’m sure they know how to manage snow. Ma, Dad’s _sick_. The cough is getting worse. We have to land.”

Her mother’s frown softened. Her lips moved: she’d sighed, but the wind took that. 

“Get some rope for the wheel,” said Ma, and they lashed it to the proper heading.

“You’re sure of our bearing?”

“Yes, I’m sure.” In the small common room of the boat, Heather showed first where they were on the map and then the island. “It’s one of Berk’s sister islands. They’ll be friendly. We won’t have to offer much for a place to stay. The Hooligans are very generous.”

Pa stood next to her mother. His cough hadn’t worsened noticeably, but he still kept a cloth to his mouth in case another fit started. Ma had given Heather a look when they got downstairs and Pa had told them he was doing fine. She gave Heather the same sort of look now, as if she thought Heather was up to tricks.

“They helped us before,” Heather said. “If Astrid hadn’t risked her life, for our sakes, then you’d probably be dead in Alvin’s prison. I’d be dead, too.”

“Don’t lay it on so thick,” said Ma fondly.

The boat rocked, sliding along another collapsing wave. Heather gripped the table for balance. The table’s edge bit into her gut. Pa swayed, and Ma put her arms around him, holding him steady. Slowly the boat settled. The ocean roiled beneath them. Another wave would come soon. His knuckles white, Pa clutched the cloth as he coughed. The fit passed. He hacked at the floor.

“She’s right, though,” Pa said, “we can’t stay out here like this.”

Heather rolled the map with her palm and slotted it in its leather tube. The lid, also leather, fitted over the end. Precautions, to keep the sea air from ruining the parchment any more than was impossible to prevent.

“It’ll be fine,” Heather said, smiling. She slicked her dark hair behind her ear. The melting ice had her hair clumping. “It’s just winter again.”


	2. One

The nightshirt engulfed Hiccup; the lad could have used it as a tent. Small wonder, as the tailor who had cut it had cut it for Stoick. Stoick rested his palm on his son’s brow. The fever sweat was sticky to his hand. The lines that had gathered between Hiccup’s eyebrows eased. Soon he had slipped into a deeper sleep, a sleep without dreams. Stoick stroked his fingers along Hiccup’s crown. He’d fine hair, like his mother’s. More brown than red; that was her doing, too. 

“You’re strong like her, too,” Stoick said. “Aye. You’ll come through.”

He sat by the bed, watching as Hiccup slept. That long, light-boned face, grown thinner as he left childhood. The preponderance of freckles across his pale skin. The paler scar on his chin. All these things were already dear. Stoick catalogued them anew.

The Night Fury drowsed, his head upon the bed and his long body fitted between the frame and the wall. He cracked his eye open as Stoick stood.

He patted Toothless’ brow. The scales were glowingly warm, and long dried. 

“You watch him now,” said Stoick. 

Toothless grumbled his assent, though Stoick hadn’t needed to tell him to do it. Stoick gave him a rough rub over the eye, and Toothless grumbled again, leaning into Stoick’s hand as Stoick drew away. Then the dragon’s only concern was for Hiccup, who frowned in his sleep and reached across the bed. The air was cold. He curled beneath the blankets. His hand dangled off the bed. Toothless sniffed at the blankets and then very delicately nudged at Hiccup’s leg. Hiccup stirred, and at last he pulled his hand to the warmth of his chest.

Hiccup had the loft for his room. In an earlier incarnation of the house, the second floor had walls to divide it into separate rooms. That was two dragon raids ago. At the time of the reconstruction, Gobber had said, “It’s a waste of lumber, dividing the loft up when it’s just you and the boy. Why don’t you give him some space to grow in? He might even actually grow.” So Stoick had given Hiccup the loft. Hiccup had muttered something about Stoick wanting him out of the way. Stoick had pretended not to hear, in part because he hadn’t wanted to argue with Hiccup then, and in part because he had suddenly doubted his own generosity.

The raids had ended but the walls had never gone up. By then the loft was truly Hiccup’s. His bed sat in the middle of the single room, and all the detritus of his interests spread out from this point, like ramshackle wings: a meager library, a work bench, several chests with boxes of things stacked on top of them, a star map he’d tacked to the floor. 

A lump moved on the bed: the Terrible Terror, lifting his head to assess Stoick. Sharpshot, recognizing Stoick, puffed a ring at him and laid his head down again, ignoring Stoick entirely after this small, smoky greeting. Stoick waved the smoke away and scowled at the wee devil. Sharpshot snored.

The boy had left a mess in his work area, tools out, several lengths of wire hanging off the table and curling at the floor, papers scattered. Likely Sharpshot had helped with the scattering: several of the cascades had the look of piles that had fallen to the side. Why the boy would want a star map tacked to the floor, Stoick could not say. He’d no interest in trying to puzzle it out either. Like certain of the gods, Hiccup’s reasons were his own, and none but he could understand such things. That was how Stoick had come to accept it. 

Whatever the reason for the map, there was no such reason for the clothes thrown to the walls. When Hiccup was on the mend, Stoick would make him straighten the loft. The space was his but that didn’t mean he should leave wires out where he could step on them. The boy only had the one foot.

Clothes, Hiccup kept in the drawers beneath his bed. Stoick had discovered this the last time Hiccup had been too ill to leave a bed. Going to a knee, Stoick pulled both drawers open. Disturbed by the grating of the wood drawers on their rollers, Sharpshot complained.

“Stopper it,” said Stoick. “Or you can sleep in the stables with the rest of the Terrors.”

Huffing, Sharpshot paced a circle and flopped on his belly. Smoke thickened the air.

Stoick tossed three tunics over his arm and then felt for trousers. Let the leg air out, Gothi had instructed, but the boy would need trousers sooner or later, and Stoick didn’t want him on the stairs with his stump as it was. The drawer for trousers and underclothes was overloaded on the right and near to bare on the left. Grabbing for what he thought might be a pair of trousers, Stoick shook them out to study the length of the legs in the poor light. Something thumped. It had fallen out of the wadded cloth when Stoick cracked it. Sharpshot whined again.

Not normally curious, Stoick did wonder what Hiccup would keep in a drawer that would bang like that. He felt blindly for it. A stone. A stone on a leather thong. Stoick weighed it. His thumb swept over the face. Runes were carved into the polished surface. The edges were rough. He traced the characters a second time, relearning the name. The chief knew the rest of it, as clearly as the day he had marked the prayer into the blessing stone. He held the stone in his hand. For a moment he was remembering. Then he tossed that last pair of trousers over his arm and he closed his hand around the amulet. He took the lot. Sharpshot sniffed reproof at Stoick’s back.

Like the Terror, Hiccup grumbled at waking. Setting the clothes on the chair, Stoick had sat on the bed and reached to shake Hiccup awake. His shoulder was lean in Stoick’s grasp, thin as a stick.

“Up,” said Stoick. He hooked his hand under Hiccup’s shoulder and hefted. “Up you get.”

Hiccup didn’t want to go to the forge. “Gobber can handle the hordes without me,” he mumbled into Stoick’s shoulder. The hoarseness of his voice scraped at Stoick. The bruises on his neck showed starkly. Lucky, then, for Dagur, that he should already be dead.

“Sit up straight,” Stoick told him. He shoved the pillows against the headboard and lifted Hiccup to them, so that when Stoick let him go the headboard kept him from falling over. 

Hiccup peered at Stoick. His eyes were runny. With the pad of a thumb, Stoick rubbed the gunk from his son’s eyes. The lad’s nose wrinkled. He wiggled his head away, whining: “Dad. That’s disgusting. Do you—do you have any idea how gross that is?”

Chuckling softly, Stoick wiped his thumb clean on his trousers leg. “I’ve cleaned fouler. Fouler, out of you. All those nappies you filled. Who do you suppose cleaned all them and wiped your bum and got you bundled up again?”

“Trolls,” muttered Hiccup, “and fairies, and—and wee forest sprites.”

Stoick tapped his shoulder. “Arms up.”

He’d put Hiccup to bed often enough as a boy. His head lolling and his eyelashes low, Hiccup did as his father told him. Stoick reclaimed the loan, stripping Hiccup of the night shirt. With the hearth well tended, the house was warm, fair near to toasty. The boy’s fever was certainly high. Yet he shivered. Hiccup folded his arms over his skinny chest and trembled. His knees rose. The left leg faltered. He laid that one out.

Stoick flapped a tunic, ridding it of folds. Again he tapped Hiccup’s shoulder. Arms up.

“I know how to put on a shirt. I’m not—completely helpless, Dad.”

“No,” Stoick agreed. “Not completely.” 

The collar caught on Hiccup’s ears. As a small boy he had yelped if Stoick tried to yank the tunic over his head: it hurt his ears when his da did that. Stoick had fussed at him to quit his fussing. Then he had learned the technique, of hitching a finger in the collar and drawing it left and then right, while also pulling at the hem, so his ears popped free. Hiccup’s head soon followed. In the quiet, warm hour, Stoick thought of his little boy, head as big around as a goose’s egg, sticking his head through and laughing at the trick, as if he’d conjured his self into the shirt rather than his father dressing him.

The head came through. His hair, sticky with sweat, mussed. The boy’s hair was ever a mess. The incongruity of this constant from youth—never combed his hair, never washed it well, forever forgetting to soap it when he did wash—with the new sharpness of Hiccup’s jaw caused a clenching in Stoick’s chest. In a half year, the lad would be eighteen. At eighteen Stoick had wed Valka.

“I’m sick, not an invalid,” Hiccup was griping. He batted Stoick off, to draw the tunic flat over his tummy on his own strength. “You could trust me to put a shirt on without falling over.”

He _was_ falling over, a slow and inexorable slide to the right. Pulling that knee to his chest had turned him too far. Stoick caught Hiccup. His shoulder butted Stoick’s elbow. 

“Aye,” said Stoick, as he eased his son to the bed. “I could do that.”

“Thank you,” said Hiccup, dignified. The smart mouth, that he’d got from Gobber.

Stoick left his hand, circled about Hiccup’s nape. Bidding he lift his head again, Stoick tossed the leather cord around Hiccup’s neck and pulled it to his shoulders so the pendant was flush with his breastbone. Stoick tucked the stone in Hiccup’s shirt.

Hiccup felt for the amulet. Disregarding his father’s care, he untucked it from his shirt to study the runes. His fingers grazed it. Hiccup’s lips moved. Eir, be you kind.

“For health,” said Stoick. “Lets the gods know you’re still here. Keep them watching you.”

Hiccup folded his hand. He held the stone. “I remember,” he said. He slipped the prayer stone under his shirt collar. His skin would warm the rock. His heart would beat against it. There was no prayer truer than this, the living asking for life.

Toothless had crept forward, his nose now at Hiccup’s breast. He smelled at the stone through the tunic. Stoick flipped the blankets over Hiccup’s chest, and Toothless reared, snorting. He narrowed his eyes at Stoick. Hiccup, smiling, covered the stone, beneath blanket and tunic, with his hand.

“It’s just a rock, buddy. If you really want one of your own, we could probably scrounge one or two out of the dirt.”

“Just a rock!” said Stoick. He faced Toothless. His chest swelled. He thumped his fist upon his breast. “That’s a blessed stone round his neck. Frigg’s own. I rescued it from the deeps, aye. A temple sunk off Lava-Lout Isle.” He came close to the Night Fury to expound on this, as a confidante would. “Four men were set as guards. They were quick. I was quicker.”

“You?” Hiccup grinned tiredly. When he spoke, he did so in a clumsy approximation of Stoick’s: “You’re many things, Stoick the Vast, but quick? Nay—” He waggled a finger, arched off his chest. “Quick is not one of those things.”

Stoick laughed in delight. “You only need to be quicker than the other man. Quicker with your axe. Quicker with a shield. Quicker with your head.” He tapped Hiccup’s brow, between his eyes.

“Ah, yes,” Hiccup rasped, “that famous Hooligan intellect of which I hear so much. So you defeated them with your … conversational skills?” His eyes were shy.

“My axe,” said Stoick. He thought a moment. Toothless looked curiously at him. Taking in a breath, Stoick then ventured a joke: “Though I did ask them what they thought of the weather.”

Hiccup’s brow arched. He held his hand to his mouth: when he laughed, a cough racked him. Stoick urged him up, meaning to clap at his back. Hiccup shook his head.

“I’m fine. You don’t have to baby me, Dad. I’m all right.”

Stoick’s hands lingered at Hiccup’s shoulder and chest. He sat again. A stray thread stuck out of the bedspread. He plucked once at it and then he propped his wrists on his knees.

“When Gothi said you should have an amulet,” said Stoick. He scratched at his temple. “Well. That’s what was at hand.”

“Never let anything go to waste,” Hiccup said. “Survival—”

“Is dependent on that,” Stoick finished. “Throw away nothing you can still use.”

Hiccup glanced to his chest. He brushed his hands through the air, to gesture to the whole of him, buried in quilts and thick furs. “Well, it doesn’t really go with my wardrobe, but, uh… I can probably make it work.”

“So long as you wear it.” Stoick set his hand on Hiccup’s head. “Will you wear it?”

He expected something smart from the boy. The fever was not so bad, then, if Hiccup was still up to his jokes. Hiccup started then stopped and then he touched at the stone again.

“I’ll wear it,” he said.

A great heaviness sat in Stoick. It had sat there long years. He could tell the boy he loved him but what use were words for carrying something so enormous? He’d an easier time making speeches to the tribe, rousing them for battle or voyage or harvest. Stoick stroked Hiccup’s hair, so fine between his thick fingers.

“Dad,” said Hiccup, long-suffering.

Stoick cleared his throat. “Well. Wear it. And rest. Gothi will be by on the morrow to see to your leg, and all the rest of this.” 

He stood and turned to organize the clothes he’d brought for Hiccup, trousers in one pile on the table by the bed, shirts another pile. He’d need to have the boy fitted soon for new tunics; his wrists stuck out the sleeves of last spring’s shirts and a good half-inch or so of his arms, too. Clucking, Stoick crossed the sleeves over the chest and then folded the shirt in half.

“Dad?”

“Mm?” said Stoick. He glanced. 

Hiccup said, “Do you—” 

He shut his mouth. Briefly, his brow furrowed, he was in thought. Then his gaze shifted from Stoick to Toothless. Hiccup gave Toothless his hand to smell. The Fury pressed nearer, so that his palm smoothed along Toothless’ dark snout, his fingers aligned with his jaw.

“Never mind,” Hiccup said.

Stoick lowered the shirt. He hesitated. His hands were huge in the fabric, cut small for Hiccup’s frame. He was only a lad, grown a boy in one kind of war. 

“I heard it from Astrid.” Stoick faced Hiccup squarely. “She told us. Dagur is…”

“Dead,” said Hiccup.

“Aye,” said Stoick after a time. “So she said.”

Hiccup petted Toothless, both hands coming to cradle his chin. The white linens tied about Hiccup’s frost-nipped fingers stood pale but plain against the gleaming blackness of Toothless’ scales. A sensitive boy, Stoick thought; like his mother was sensitive. Stoick had intended to find a gentler way to say it, that Dagur was dead; then Hiccup had said it, ungently.

Stoick clasped Hiccup’s shoulder; he held him firmly. Hiccup turned his long, thin, sick-red face up. He had been nine, Stoick, when he killed his first dragon, a young Gronckle that had got into the house through the burning roof. It screamed tremendously after Stoick bashed it; it went on screaming till it died. His father had said how proud he was of Stoick. His father was dead by the time Stoick was fifteen and he killed his first man. The man hadn’t screamed. He’d stared at Stoick in disbelief, and then he’d spat blood, and then Stoick had pulled his spear from the man’s throat.

“It isn’t weakness,” said Stoick. He said it haltingly. “To regret a death. Even a death as deserved as the one your Astrid gave Dagur.”

Hiccup looked again to Toothless. A ghost of the old frustration stirred in Stoick: the boy never listens. He laid that thing in its grave anew. Hiccup could give every appearance of ignoring someone entirely and still remember everything they’d said. It was a wonder, Stoick thought, that Hiccup had ever forgiven the twins or Snotlout. Whether Hiccup understood the meaning of what was said, that was always the trouble.

“It is never easy,” Stoick said more firmly. He shook Hiccup by the shoulder.

At last Hiccup met his father’s gaze. His mouth twisted. “What about all that incomparable glory? That, that incredible rush in the heat of battle.”

“Yes,” said Stoick, “sometimes there’s glory in it. And I’ve enjoyed the bloodlust. Most of us have.” He shook Hiccup again when the boy’s mouth twisted further. “Listen to me, Hiccup. _Hear_ me. Yes. It’s true. I’ve killed a few men in my time that I was glad to kill. But it is never easy. It is _never_ easy.”

Hiccup studied Stoick. What did his son see in him? His eyes were so like Valka’s, but they were his own. He could bear Valka’s judgment, but he did not know how well he might bear their son’s. Stoick lowered his eyes that he would not see what Hiccup saw.

“When it becomes easy,” said Stoick. “That’s when you’ve lost the respect in you for life.” He worked his fingers on Hiccup’s arm. Hiccup watched him. “You showed us that. Reminded me of it. When you taught us about the dragons.”

He chanced a look. Hiccup was staring at the bedspread, at the thread that still stuck out from it. 

“I didn’t kill Dagur,” Hiccup said.

“Maybe not,” said Stoick, lowering his head to look in Hiccup’s eyes, “but I know something of guilt. When your mother—” 

He cut off. Stoick let go of Hiccup’s arm.

“When we lost your mother,” he tried again. “It didn’t matter that I wasn’t the devil beast that stole her.” He beat his chest once, hard. “I felt what that dragon ought.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” said Hiccup.

There was no comfort in that. There had never been comfort in it.

“Don’t judge your self too harshly, son,” Stoick said. He thought of the young woman who’d held Hiccup in her arms and told Stoick of Dagur. “Don’t you judge Astrid for it, either.”

Hiccup’s head rose sharply. “I would never judge Astrid.” He swore it. “She saved my life. She—she did what I couldn’t do.”

Ah, thought Stoick. So that was it.

“There’s no shame in not killing,” he said, feeling it odd in his mouth, given what all else he had said to Hiccup in his time.

“I’m not ashamed of myself for not killing Dagur,” Hiccup snapped. “That isn’t—” He ran his hands through his hair. “Gods! You don’t understand. There was a, a dragon, that Dagur captured, that he was going to use to kill his sister, a ‘pox dragon’—”

“Pox!” said Stoick, beginning to swell.

“It didn’t make me sick,” Hiccup said. “It couldn’t make anyone sick, it was—hurt, and dying, and—” He turned away, his jaw flexing. His hands fell to the bedspread; his fingers, bandaged and unbandaged, were limp. “There wasn’t anything I could do for it.” He was looking, then, to Toothless, who crooned softly at Hiccup in wordless question.

Stoick did understand it then, what Astrid had done and Hiccup had not. 

“Lad,” said Stoick. He made to touch his shoulder.

Hiccup rolled over on his side, with a suddenness that startled Toothless off the bed. He curled. His back, to Stoick, arched; his shoulders pulled as he wrapped his arms in front.

“I don’t feel good,” he said. His head shifted. He pressed his face to the pillow.

Stoick’s hand fell.

Creeping forward, Toothless laid his snout in the hollow between Hiccup’s drawn-up knees and his chest. He huffed a breath. Hiccup’s high shoulder twitched: he unfolded his arm, to stroke Toothless.

“Aye,” said Stoick. “You should rest.”

He did rest after a short while, lapsing into another deep and fevered sleep. Now and then Hiccup emerged out of that more restful place to a shallow one of dreams, and Stoick would set aside his work—polishing boots, or whetting a knife—or rouse from his own doze in the chair by the fire to lean over his son and tell him to go back to sleep. It was only a dream. The lines would soften. He’d ease. 

Toothless held watch over Hiccup, and Stoick patted his cheek in silent thanks. The dragon rolled a green eye to look at Stoick. Then those strange scaled lips pulled back to show his gums. 

Slowly, in his sleep, Hiccup rolled onto his back and then his other side. Again, he was facing Stoick. His hair plastered to his brow. A hand came up to rest before his nose. The two bandaged fingers shifted, a passing, restless struggle. 

“Ah, Valka,” said Stoick. “Look how big our boy’s grown.”

He sat by the fire, watching Hiccup sleep. Morning neared. Winter battered at the chief’s house. A cruel howl came galloping off the mountain. Inside the house the fire kept them warm through the night.

*

The sudden advent of winter allowed Berk little time to finish all the preparations for which they’d thought they had a month. Someone had gone out on the first day to string up some rudimentary guide lines through part of the village, but too many people thought the snow storm would pass. “It’s too early in the season for a real humdinger,” scoffed Nobber to a sympathetic audience in Meade Hall. They all agreed: far too early for a thing like that. The storm would move on, sure enough. Outside the snow piled in drifts.

By nightfall even Nobber realized this was a humdinger of the very real persuasion. The depth of the snow and the ferocity of the wind assured him of it. Like many an old-timer before him, Nobber turned about and said if only everyone had listened to him, they would have known to brace for an early winter. 

What it amounted to in the end was the choice of whether to batten down and hope for a reprieve between this storm and the next, or whether to go out into this storm and do what you could in anticipation of what might be coming after. In some sunnier locale to the south, perhaps a breather could be expected. In Berk, they’d no expectation of such. So on went the hats, the scarves, the gloves and the boots, the winter coats, and out they went.

“I hate digging ditches,” Snotlout groused. He’d groused the entire time he’d been with them; only four minutes, perhaps less, but the grousing made it seem as though hours had gone. “We could be out there, doing the heavy lifting, but no. It’s ‘dig ditches, kids.’”

Ruffnut stared at him with her eyes lidded and her jaw slack. “Uh, news flash,” she said. “Nobody likes digging ditches. Why do you think my dumb brother faked sick?”

“To get away from you?” he suggested.

“You better get away from me,” said Ruffnut, “or…” She hefted her shovel. Her fingers closed about the haft.

Snotlout recoiled, hands in the air. “It was a _joke_. Now you can’t take a joke?”

“Can you take blunt force trauma?”

Astrid drove her shovel into the snow and worked her muffler down, freeing her lips.

“You guys realize the more time you waste arguing, the more time we have to stay out here digging ditches.”

Fishlegs piped up. “If we put our heads together and try to play to our individual strengths—”

Snotlout cut him off with a snort and a zip it gesture. “‘If we put our heads together.’ No, thanks. While you losers are digging holes in the ground for dragon poop, I’m—”

“Going to stay right here,” Astrid said. She jerked her head. “Snotlout. Over here. Now.”

At another time he might have made some nasty remark. She knew precisely what he would have said and how he would have said it. “If you wanted to get me alone, you just had to ask.” Flushing darkly, Snotlout lowered his head and stomped through the snow.

“Ooooo,” Ruffnut called at his back, “Mom’s ma-a-ad. Looks like someone’s getting a spanking.”

Snotlout threw her a rude hand gesture, and Ruffnut arched backwards, cackling. Her helmet tumbled to the snow, and Fishlegs bent to fetch it.

“You dropped your…”

“I have knees, Fishlegs,” she said scornfully.

“Well,” he said, “you don’t have to be rude.”

Snatching the helmet from him, Ruffnut slammed it on her own head. “Oh, Fishlegs,” she said, very sadly. “Yeah. I do. Now get your juicy butt over here and make your girlfriend Meatlug melt the ground.”

“Juicy!” he squeaked, then, louder, “Girlfriend!”

Snotlout, nearly to Astrid, turned as though he meant to join their conversation. Snagging her hand in his collar, Astrid hauled him so he faced her instead, their noses close. He startled, ripping from her grip. The violence of his reaction was what stung, but that only fleetly. Still, when she spoke, she started not with what she’d wanted to say but:

“Whatever your problem is with me,” Astrid said, “get over it.”

The cast of his face was yak-ish. He glared over her shoulder.

“I don’t have a problem with you.”

If he were Hiccup, she would have pushed him. If he were anyone other than Snotlout, she would have pushed him. She had thought perhaps during the rescue mission they had begun to bridge the distance that had formed, and formed because of his actions and his feelings toward her over the last few years, between them, that it was possible for her to be friends again with Snotlout.

“Fine,” said Astrid stiffly. “But I have a problem with you.”

“Me!” He gaped at her. “Astrid, you—”

“Expect you to do what’s asked of you,” she said, whomping his shoulder with the back of her hand. In his coat, and with her glove, the blow couldn’t hurt, but Snotlout flinched as if it did. “None of us want to be out here. But we are because Berk needs us to be out here.”

He rubbed at his shoulder. “No, we’re out here because my dad’s second in charge and he told us we were on ditch duty. What—would you be out here if _General_ Spitelout hadn’t _ordered_ you?”

“Yes!” she said, flaring. “Because it has to be done! You know this is important. You know why this is important. You’re not an idiot, Snotlout.” Inspiration struck. “You proved that on the rescue mission. When you were leading everyone.”

Still nursing his shoulder, he was eyeing her. “Yeah,” he said, “I did prove that. Again.”

“So go—stick your head in the snow until you can think like a person instead of Tuffnut,” she said, flipping her hand toward the nearest snow bank. 

“Tuffnut’s not here,” Snotlout grumbled.

“Tuffnut’s sick,” said Astrid.

“He’s a total faker!” shouted Ruffnut. “He stole the idea from Hiccup, too. He’s probably laughing in bed right now, while Mom’s making him soup. If I wanted, I could be way sicker than Tuffnut.”

Fishlegs raised his hand tentatively. “I think you’re already pretty sick.”

“Thank you,” said Ruffnut.

“Come on,” Astrid said, “we have to do ten of these today. And Snotlout’s right. I don’t want to be out here. So let’s try to do this quickly.” She pulled the muffler over her mouth.

The ditches were common use, a means to consolidate dragon waste and then conserve it to fertilize the fields outside the village come spring. Ten was an optimistic goal, seven possible, five probable. In the early morning Hekja had taken Stormfly to the Hofferson clan’s holdings, some eight hours’ walk north west of the village, to help secure the livestock and the farm, and neither Hookfang (teething and hostile) nor Barf and Belch (their fire concussive rather than sustained) was suited to the work of clearing snow. So it was Meatlug and Meatlug alone who shouldered that task, though she did so happily, content to chew dirt on her long breaks. 

Too, Astrid had thought the twins the height of distraction, but without Tuffnut as a buffer, Ruffnut butted against Snotlout. Thrice Astrid broke up fights. Ruffnut needled Snotlout, complimenting his handsomeness or his charm or his skill with the ladies with acidic insincerity. Snotlout returned each volley with harsh comparisons of Ruffnut to her brother. 

“All right, that’s it!” Astrid said. She handed her shovel to Fishlegs and stamped over to haul first Ruffnut then Snotlout out of the snow. “You’re both in time-out.”

“Excuse me?” said Snotlout.

“You’re not my real mom!” said Ruffnut.

“You!” Astrid shoved Snotlout to the northern perimeter of the ditch. “And you!” She shoved Ruffnut south. “And you—”

“I didn’t do anything!” Fishlegs protested.

“Go with her,” Astrid said. She grabbed the shovel from him. “I’ll make sure Snotlout doesn’t make any sudden moves on this end.”

“But I didn’t do anything,” Fishlegs said woefully again.

Astrid just pointed. Like a man crushed beneath a boulder, with no hope of mercy, Fishlegs hung his head and slogged toward Ruffnut, who was beating at the frost-hardened earth with her shovel as though she meant to cow the ground so badly it would split open for her and they’d be done. Again, Astrid fixed her muffler—the wool damp from her breath, and rough to her skin—and set to work.

For a time they were all working steadily in silence. Then Fishlegs and Ruffnut’s voice came softly to her, snatches that the wind brought her. The snowfall drove on.

“Do you always have to pick fights with people?”

“Do you always ask dumb questions you already know the answer to? I thought you were supposed to be the smartie. All oh I can’t wait to learn something new today.”

“You’re right,” Fishlegs said. “I shouldn’t even bother.”

“You shouldn’t,” she said in cheerful agreement.

Astrid hoped Ruffnut didn’t try to rough house Fishlegs. As quick as Astrid was on her feet, she thought Ruffnut could lay Fishlegs out flat before Astrid could rescue him from Ruff’s terrifyingly sharp elbows. But they were quiet now, and she looked instead at Snotlout where he worked, savagely, alone. He’d a thick pile of earth behind him, just outside the shape of the ditch, drawn with the side of a shovel before they’d started. In isolation Snotlout worked efficiently. His brow was heavy. He glowered.

“What do you think’s bugging Astrid?” Ruffnut whispered noisily.

She nearly snapped about to face them, startled by her name. Clenching her neck, she kept her head down.

“Uh,” said Fishlegs, actually whispering. “I’m not sure that’s the best idea, since she’s right there.”

“Stop being such a weenie,” Ruffnut hissed. Fishlegs yelped.

Turning her back to them, Astrid cocked her head just so, half-presenting her ear. She’d some practice at sneaking. 

“You can’t just hit people every time they say something you disagree with.”

“Oh, yes, I can.”

“Okay, grammatically, yes, but that doesn’t mean you should—stop hitting me!” Fishlegs snapped.

“Stop being a weenie!”

“Stop being a, a _troglodyte_.”

“Ha ha ha,” said Ruffnut triumphantly, “I don’t know what that means! Weenie beanie.”

“I’m not a beanie,” Fishlegs said, as though this were what hurt. He paused. “Although I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean.”

“You’re the biggest, squishiest beanie on Berk,” Ruffnut said. “Smartie fartie doesn’t even know what he is, ha!”

Fishlegs made muffled sounds, similar enough in frequency to cries for help that Astrid chunked her shovel into the earth and turned, hands on her hips. She stopped. Fishlegs looked at Astrid with huge, frightened eyes. This was not what stopped her. Ruffnut, her helmet in the snow again and her thin braids sticking out above her ears like horns, had climbed Fishlegs. One leg was wrapped around his front; she’d braced her other foot on his shoulder, and her arms engulfed his head. She resembled nothing so much as a spider preparing to consume a fly. Fishlegs grappled with Ruffnut’s leg, realized that was her thigh he was pulling on, and then threw his arms in the air.

The air burst out of Astrid, too close to a laugh. The muffler caught it. She forced a scowl and held it as she yanked the muffler from her face, again. I might as well just leave it off, she thought.

“Ruffnut, what are you doing?”

“Um,” said Ruffnut. She laid her cheek on top of his head as she thought. Fishlegs froze with his arms held high and out to the sides. 

Astrid had the thought—the mad thought—of Fishlegs flying as a dragon would, with Ruffnut on his shoulders and hooting. Violently, Astrid coughed into her fist. 

“I’m workshopping interpersonal communication skills,” Ruffnut said carefully, her eyes flicking. “By reminding Fishlegs that I’m the top dog, and he’s the weenie beanie.” She smiled, pleased, and socked Fishlegs on the shoulder.

“You’re the top pest,” Fishlegs grumbled.

Ruffnut tightened all her long arms and legs about him. “What did you say, weenie beanie?” Her knees and elbows converged around his throat. “You want to challenge me?”

“Nothing,” he squeaked. “You’re the top dog. I wouldn’t dare challenge you. I’m too, uh, weenie.”

“Weenie beanie.”

“Weenie beanie,” said Fishlegs. “Please help me.”

“Ruffnut, stop terrorizing Fishlegs,” Astrid said. She pointed meaningfully to the ground.

“I don’t get to have any fun,” Ruffnut complained, unwinding. She swung about to Fishlegs’ back, as though to ride his shoulders after all—Astrid exhaled high through her nose and then pinched the bridge to stop the rest of the laugh—and then she dropped gracelessly to the snow behind Fishlegs. The drift swallowed her knees. “‘Ruffnut, stop punching Snotlout.’ ‘Ruffnut, stop terrorizing Fishlegs.’ ‘Ruffnut, stop trying to set Bucket on fire.’ ‘Ruffnut—’”

“Ruffnut, get over here,” said Astrid, amused.

Making a face, Ruffnut grabbed her shovel by the butt and dragged it across the ground. She was still grumbling. As she left, Fishlegs sighed powerfully. He clutched at his throat and also at his breast, one hand over his heart, and as he looked after Ruffnut, he shuddered. Meatlug roused, and she lifted her head to look briefly at Ruffnut and then at Fishlegs. She snorted.

“It’s okay, precious,” Fishlegs said, “Daddy’s okay now. He’s safe.”

Ruffnut widened her eyes at Astrid and stuck her tongue out as far as it would go, as if gagging.

“We’re never going to get any work done if you keep picking on everyone,” Astrid told her.

“If I don’t pick on them, who’s gonna?”

“Nobody?”

“Exactly,” said Ruffnut, preening.

“Just dig,” Astrid said. She drove the shovel in the dirt and hit the head with her foot, digging it in deeper. 

Ruffnut’s technique more resembled her work with a spear: she spun the shovel, gaining momentum, and then sliced the head into the earth, wedging it inches down. Flashy, but effective, in contrast to Astrid’s preferred style of solid functionality: the same result, obtained by different means.

“Nice,” said Astrid.

A long cat’s smile, pulling high to the right, flashed across Ruffnut’s lean mouth. She fluffed her hair, the short ends brushing her shoulders. She’d forgone the extensions she used most days.

“Duh. It’s ‘cause I’m practically perfect.”

“You need to spend less time with Snotlout.”

Ruffnut leaned heavily on her shovel and made another show of gagging, tongue out and eyes rolled up. “In his _dreams_. His grody dreams.”

Wedging the shovel’s head down with her heel, Astrid grunted. “Something’s up with you. You’re not usually that aggressive.”

“False,” Ruffnut said swiftly. “Who said I’m not aggressive? I’m totally aggro, like, one hundred percent of the time. Five hundred percent of the time. I’m way more aggressive than Tuffnut.”

“See?” Astrid pushed Ruffnut’s shoulder. “Like that. I know you’re always trying to show each other up, but usually he’s at least _here_.”

Ruffnut shouldered Astrid right back, and they battled briefly with their elbows, smacking at each other before Astrid established a truce by digging her elbow in Ruffnut’s ribs. Grunting, Ruffnut shied away to rub at her gut.

“It was higher than that,” Astrid said.

Shrugging, Ruffnut gave up the act. “Why do you care anyway?”

Astrid jerked the shovel free of the earth, particularly hard right there. She adjusted her grip on the shaft, finding a better balance, and then she broke the ground with two precise blows, weakening the supportive frost surrounding her target. Meatlug could have defrosted it for her. Astrid shook her hair from her eyes and slammed the shovel home. She leveraged that frozen chunk of dirt—huge and profoundly heavy—out of the ground. 

Her concentration on balancing that rock-ish dirt boulder, Astrid said, “We’re friends. Right?” The right was too large an admission. She swallowed against it.

Ruffnut breathed in. Astrid braced for a needle. Ruffnut said, “Right,” and she smiled at Astrid: not grinned or smirked, but smiled, with the corners of her eyes tipping up.

Astrid flung the boulder into the snow. It plopped, spraying powder in a lopsided circle. She shook her hair back again.

“So. What’s going on with you?”

Ruffnut glanced at Fishlegs, busy scolding Meatlug for deciding to take her nap on the ground she’d just warmed. Meatlug whined at him in return, so piteous that he’d soon capitulate and move on to another place to dig, likely closer to Astrid and Ruffnut. Then she, together with Astrid, looked to Snotlout, puffing and red-faced as he struggled alone to avenge his pride.

Ruffnut’s rejoinder was calculated: “What’s going on with _you_?”

Astrid glowered at Ruffnut. Ruffnut was unmoved. The sly look remained at her eyes.

“I asked you first,” Astrid said.

Ruffnut rolled her eyes. “So? It’s just dumb family stuff.”

“That you don’t want Fishlegs or Snotlout to hear about?” Astrid asked pointedly.

As Ruffnut was unmoved by Astrid’s glower, Astrid was unmoved by Ruffnut’s. Ruffnut’s scowl turned to a pout, nearly as piteous as Meatlug’s though Astrid suspected it would prove significantly less effective on Fishlegs if Ruffnut should ever turn it his way.

Ruffnut rested her shovel in her armpit, clasping it as she ticked her fingers. “Snotlout’s a skeeve. A _horny_ skeeve. I don’t want him to know about it. Not that there’s anything for anyone to know about anyway,” she snapped.

“Of course not,” said Astrid dryly.

Ruffnut considered Fishlegs. He’d picked her helmet up and set it right-side up on Meatlug’s back, out of the snow.

“Fishlegs is okay,” Ruffnut said. “He’s a total weenie but he’s okay. But he’s also a blabbermouth. He can’t keep _any_ secrets.”

“Not that you have a secret,” Astrid murmured.

“Yeah,” said Ruffnut, “not that I _have_ a secret. ‘Cause I don’t.” She added this hurriedly and then looked down with her shoulders hunched and her lower lip pinched between her teeth. She glanced dartingly at Astrid.

“If you did have a secret,” Astrid said. “Would you tell me?”

Ruffnut swung the shovel to her hands. She squeezed the haft, testing it. Her eyes flicked: she glanced again at Astrid.

“Only if you swore you’d fall on a knife if you told anyone. A rusty knife. Four rusty knives. Chest, stomach, groin.”

“Where would the fourth one go?” Astrid teased.

“Butt,” said Ruffnut upon contemplating this riddle. “After you rolled over in agony.”

Astrid wiggled her shovel, rocking the tip in the dirt. Then she clasped it in her elbow, bent. She stuck her hand at Ruffnut.

“Okay,” Astrid said. “I swear it. Four rusty knives if I breathe a word about it to anyone. Chest, stomach, groin, and butt.”

Ruffnut looked from Astrid to her hand to Astrid’s face again. A sharpness gripped Ruffnut’s jaw and then it blunted, like the edge of one of those rusted knives. She swapped her shovel to her far hand and then she took Astrid’s offering, grasping Astrid’s hand almost delicately in her own. 

“If you swear?”

“I swear,” Astrid said.

Ruffnut’s grip strengthened. Astrid lifted her hand and Ruffnut followed, their palms clasped together and their elbows crooked. Steadily Astrid held her gaze. That strange hesitation settled in Ruffnut, and she grinned.

“All right,” she said. “I’ll tell you.” She glanced over Astrid’s shoulder, toward Snotlout. Her brow dropped. Ruffnut huffed. “Later. When there aren’t any dumb boys around.”

She made to let Astrid go, but Astrid tightened her grip about Ruffnut’s hand, holding her there. Having turned her foot to step away, Ruffnut had to bend to keep her balance. If Ruffnut could take the chance, thought Astrid. They’d known one another all their lives. Still, Astrid had never thought of Ruffnut as a friend, but as a pest, a peer, one half of the unit that was Tuffnut and Ruffnut, the cleverer half, perhaps, but nonetheless a Thorston. Everyone knew the Thorstons: weird, wild folk who still prayed to the gods in the old ways, with dead goats and drunken revels.

Astrid clutched Ruffnut’s hand. She clutched it close.

“You swear?”

Ruffnut blinked. “What?”

“Four rusty knives?” Astrid prompted.

Again Ruffnut blinked. Then her lean cheeks pinched. Her smile spread, rising in sickle arches on either side. She’d a drunken look to her when she smiled like that.

“I swear,” said Ruffnut, “on pain of _ten_ rusty knives, that I won’t punk out. On my honor as a Thorston.”

Arching her brow, Astrid gambled and said, “The Thorstons have honor?”

Snotlout would have taken a swing at her for a remark like that. Even Fishlegs might have gotten snippy with her. Tuffnut, she thought, would have called into question the Hofferson clan’s honor; a poorly planned escalation that would have ended with his nose bloodied. 

Ruffnut threw her head back and slapped her hands together around Astrid’s hand and laughed. So, she’d gambled correctly. Astrid allowed a grin.

“Wherever we can find it,” Ruffnut said cheerfully. “Then we throw it in a pit and burn it. If you do it that way Loki listens, sometimes.”

They released hands. Still giggling, Ruffnut spun her shovel and lanced the earth with it.

“I thought you worshipped Thor.” Astrid hauled her shovel free.

“Maybe the fuddy duddies do. But Loki’s _my_ god. I bet you like Thor, though. Wait—ugh, no, your clan’s god is _Forseti_.” Ruffnut drew the god of justice’s name out long and slow, as though it were a worm she tugged free of her throat.

“So?” Astrid said defensively. She smashed the shovel into the earth. The boys—all but Tuffnut—might have taken the warning, but Ruffnut did not. “What’s wrong with Forseti?”

“Nothing,” said Ruffnut, “if you’re boring. You totally are! You’re totally boring. Astrid the Forseti-Worshipper.” More worms, plucked squirming and wretched from her mouth. Ruffnut stamped her feet. “Why do you have to be boring?”

“Go shovel dirt with Fishlegs, then,” Astrid suggested, “if I’m so boring.”

Ruffnut looked back at Fishlegs. He’d made real progress, despite the thickening snowfall. A large mound of earth rose darkly from the snow drift. The shovel was forgotten: he had taken a break to fuss over Meatlug, tickling at her chin as he exhorted her to stick her tongue out and let him see. In wonder, Ruffnut shook her head. Then she curved her hand around her mouth and really leaned into it:

“Hey! Stop touching your dragon, pervert! There’s girls here!”

As like a crab lightly boiled, Fishlegs pinked. His mouth flapped like the fish for which he was named: he was speechless, and then he found words. “Ruffnut!” His voice cracked. He was working up into a temper, Astrid thought in amazement. “You can’t—that’s—you’re filthy!”

Ruffnut took offense. “I am not! Tuffnut’s filthy. _I_ bathe, twice a week. And I even do my hair, too. Come over here and smell.”

“I’m not going anywhere near you,” Fishlegs said. His strident tone gave way to worry. “What if your dirtiness infects me? And then I get it all over my beautiful princess? That’s right, Meatlug, Daddy will never go near that nasty girl.”

Like a thunder cloud, Ruffnut swelled. Her hands came up, fisted, the shovel clasped in her right hand.

“Just ignore him,” Astrid said. She nudged Ruffnut. “You did start it. Remember?”

Ruffnut whipped around. If she’d worn her extensions, she might have caught Astrid across the face with a braid. “That doesn’t mean he can fight back!”

“So he’s just supposed to let you beat on him?”

“Uh, he’s Fishlegs?” said Ruffnut, but she did lower the shovel and then, upon consideration, her fist too. Her fingers flexed. Again she glanced at Fishlegs. Her ears were red where they stuck out from her hair. The length of her mouth curled in upon itself. She fisted her hand. “When he fights back, it makes me wanna sit on his head.”

Astrid stared.

“Grind his face into the dirt till he screams,” Ruffnut said dreamily.

“Okay,” said Astrid. “You’re going to stay here with me until we’re done with this ditch.”

Ruffnut glanced slyly at her. “But you’re boring. Re-mem-ber?”

“Boring or not, you’re stuck,” Astrid said. “I am not explaining to Fishlegs’ parents why he died in a ditch.”

“But it’d be so cute,” Ruffnut whined. “And he wouldn’t die. I’d just suffocate him a little. Just a little bit?”

Thinking of a few remarks the twins had made over the last year or so, and thinking too of how Fishlegs had clutched at his chest and shuddered as he stared after Ruffnut, in co-mingled horror and something akin to academic fascination, Astrid said, “You know, if you didn’t kill him, I think his family might consider that a proposal.” Ruffnut looked blank. “Of _marriage_.”

Ruffnut jumped as if scalded, or like a cat dropped in a pot of water. She yowled, too.

“Ugh!” she said, then again: “Ugh!” She jittered in place, shaking her hands out before her. The shovel clattered to the ground. Ruffnut threw her head back and groaned to the heavens: increasingly dark, the snow falling white on her face, there to melt. “I’d rather eat nails! I’d rather eat toenails!”

“You’re the one who wanted to sit on him,” Astrid dared. Her neck was warm under the muffler. She’d clear enough an idea of what she suggested, and an even clearer insight as it left her mouth, that she was daring a great deal. What the twins had said the other day remained with her. She’d awareness of her self, and newly clarified awareness of how the others must see her. Boring Astrid, so removed.

Ruffnut wailed, “To choke him!” and buried her face in her hands. She jigged again. From between her hands came ragged breaths, pale in the air. Ruffnut moaned.

At one end of the ditch, Fishlegs eyed her warily as a man might a mad dog. At the other end of the ditch, Snotlout stared openly with his eyebrows up and the first traces of a laughing grin starting at his mouth. Astrid shot them each a look rife with threat, and Fishlegs lowered his gaze. Snotlout, forgetting their awkwardness, pulled a face at Astrid.

Astrid thumped Ruffnut’s bowed shoulder. “I’m sure they won’t make you marry Fishlegs. Even if you do sit on him.”

Ruffnut shivered and lowered her hands so her fingertips covered her mouth and not her eyes. “I don’t _ever_ want to talk about boys again,” she grated.

“Deal,” Astrid said, and she crouched to rescue Ruffnut’s shovel and to hide the relief she was sure passed over her features as surely as it did Ruffnut’s. Oh, Ruffnut had make a joke or two in the past about Astrid and Hiccup, but Astrid had found it weird on her tongue, and the doubt that had struck at her—that such jokes would be unwelcome from Astrid—weirder yet. She stood and, as she stood, handed Ruffnut the shovel.

Ruffnut grinned at her. It occurred to Astrid that she couldn’t entirely put it past Ruffnut, that she might have orchestrated the whole of her consternation as an elaborate tease. Astrid studied Ruffnut. She didn’t look as though she had masterminded her own humiliation. With the twins, who could say? Mischief in earnest, cunning without thought: but what would Ruffnut have won by making a joke of her self? Astrid began to ask. She held her tongue on her teeth. That might be pushing it too far. Did you mean to make yourself an idiot? Uncomfortably, suddenly uncertain of where she stood, Astrid resumed digging.

Though she grumbled, Ruffnut returned to work, too. Her ears were very red indeed. Astrid weighed speaking with not speaking. The snow flurried in clouds. Five ditches seemed increasingly farfetched. Ruffnut hummed tunelessly as she cracked the earth, splitting the soil with ease and purpose. She stepped before Astrid and bent her head as she pushed a shovel’s worth of dirt up. The hair fell over her ears but couldn’t hide them. Astrid slipped easily into the role of mother duck.

“You should get your helmet.”

“It’s okay,” Ruffnut said. “I don’t really mind it. I can’t feel my ears anyway so that’s good.”

“No,” said Astrid, “that’s _bad_.”

“And you still haven’t answered _my_ question.”

“What question?”

Ruffnut twisted about on her heel. Lightly she poked Astrid’s shoulder. “What’s eating you?”

Again Astrid was prepared to speak, to deny anything bothered her. Ruffnut waited. An uncharitable thought: so what if Ruffnut had asked? Astrid didn’t owe her any explanations; they were hardly friends. Something even crueler pricked at Astrid, the understanding, from childhood, that Ruffnut, like Tuffnut, was a fool and a bully, an overgrown child. She would put up with Ruffnut’s antics because she had little other choice, but she’d known for years not to expect anything more of either twin. 

The old song was in her head. _There’s no one can fight like a Hofferson: when they see a dragon, they freeze or they run!_ Neither Ruffnut nor Tuffnut had composed it, but they had happily shared it with Astrid. Who wanted friendship with a girl who thought she knew you; and what she thought and what she knew was that she didn’t care to know you?

The wind broke upon them. Ruffnut blanched and clapped her free hand over her ear. Her shoulder, arched, half-covered the other.

“Get your helmet,” Astrid said. 

“Yes, Mom,” Ruffnut said, crossing her eyes at Astrid. Then she flipped her shovel to Astrid, who snatched it out of the air.

She ran in a long, hopping stride to Meatlug, crossing the half-finished ditch. The snowflakes were sticking to the soil. Seeing Ruffnut’s advance, Fishlegs tossed her the helmet. She dove to catch it; his pitch was weak and under-handed. Astrid winced as Ruffnut looked to crash into the dirt, but she turned her pratfall into a roll and came up holding the helmet tucked under her arm and her other fist held high.

“Ten points Thorston!” Ruffnut hollered. 

Politely, Astrid banged the shovel heads together, and Ruffnut rose, bowing. 

“Fishlegs, can you ask Meatlug to warm the ground?” Astrid directed. “Snotlout, that’s enough on that end. We need you down here. If we’re going to get any of the other ditches done before the storm kicks back up, then we have to work.”

Ruffnut loped to Astrid, to reclaim her shovel. “Aw. But the snow makes it more fun. Snotlout likes a challenge. Don’t you?”

“I don’t like challenges,” Snotlout sneered, “I destroy them.”

“Well, Fishlegs was saying he doesn’t think you can dig the rest of this ditch by yourself,” Ruffnut said.

Astrid kicked her knee, and Ruffnut went down bellowing. 

“Tell Fishlegs I could do it with my legs tied behind my head,” Snotlout snapped, and Astrid socked his arm. “Ow! Hey!” He flung his hand out, gesturing to Fishlegs. “What am I supposed to do? Fishlegs challenged my manhood—”

“Fishlegs hasn’t done anything except do what I’ve told him to do.”

Confusion flicked across Snotlout’s face, and then his features tightened, the skin around his nose tensed. “ _You_ told Fishlegs to—”

“To dig!” Astrid shoved Snotlout on. “Ruffnut is just messing with your head.”

“Dummy,” Ruffnut snickered from her agonized collapse. 

Snotlout, his chest filling, opened his mouth.

“Go!” Astrid yelled. 

Wonder of wonders, he went; though he looked twice over his shoulder at them, at Ruffnut or perhaps at Astrid. Fishlegs had finally coaxed Meatlug into stirring from her nap. Yawning, she let her tongue roll out. Bubbling fire rolled out with it.

“And you,” Astrid said, rounding on Ruffnut. Ruffnut looked at Astrid with huge eyes: who, me? She even delicately laid her hand over her breast. When Astrid thrust her shoulders back, Ruffnut winced.

Astrid bent. The haft of the shovel was solid, firm. She lifted it with little effort; the shovels were lighter by far than her mother’s axe, lighter than Ruffnut’s long spear. Astrid flipped the shovel around and, a final time, offered the handle to Ruffnut. Peering suspiciously at Astrid, Ruffnut nevertheless accepted this from her. Smoothly Astrid stood.

“Later,” she promised Ruffnut. She’d made the same promise to her mother, in another fashion. 

Ruffnut’s distrust remained; she was wary a moment longer. Then the echo caught up to her. 

“It better be something exciting,” Ruffnut said, accepting this thing offered to her too, “or seriously freaky. Like you’ve got another face on the back of your head.” She pitched her voice to a whisper. “Is that why your hair’s so long?”

“Just dig,” Astrid said. Her nose wrinkled as she tried not to smile. Ruffnut hardly needed encouragement. “Or I might just leave you out here to freeze.”

Ruffnut disagreed. “You’re too boring to just leave somebody to die.” Then her wandering gaze shored on Fishlegs, and Ruffnut had moved on, driven by the caprices known only to her and perhaps to Tuffnut, in absentia. 

A flake of snow butted against Astrid cheek, beneath her eye. She blinked it away. Her breath billowed. With such sweet gentility Meatlug walked on the earth she’d softened, like a goose tending a nest. The rotted egg stink lingered, though the wind dragged at it. Wedging a finger in the muffler, Astrid drew it over her mouth again. She hoisted it high upon her face, so that only her eyes showed over the top. With the muffler to blunt it, her breath clung, a cloying heat. In the absence of another’s company, Astrid had only her thoughts and what lurked in them. 

Astrid forced the shovel into the resisting earth. Stiff cracks ran out from the point of impact. She struck again and then she braced her foot on the shovel, and she pushed at it till the seam split and the metal ran deep, and true, sinking into the earth like an axe to wood; naturally. For this purpose had it been made, and so for this purpose did she use it.

The twins had sung it together, Tuffnut’s the higher and Ruffnut’s a mocking growl: “There’s no one can fight like a Hofferson.” She hadn’t forgotten.

*

The reprieve lasted only the morning. By the noon hour the blizzard had begun, like coiling snake, to close about Berk; by evening it was as though the storm had never eased. Gothi had expected as much. In her little hut at the top of the first peak, she’d a long view out to sea, a view that extended nearly so long as her life had. Looking to the clouds and then to experience, she concluded it best to see the chief’s boy before afternoon.

In winter, her niece’s daughter, Fudjabit, stayed with Gothi. The arrangement was an old one. Fudjabit, no spring chicken her self these days, had shown up at Gothi’s door some twenty years ago with a bright smile and two bags. “I’m here to look after you, Auntie Goth!” Fudj had chirped. The unspoken sentiment was: on account of you’re so feeble. Gothi had closed the door in Fudj’s face. The nerve of the young, she’d thought. 

That was before Fudj had whined all night outside, that her mother would throw her in the river, et cetera, and didn’t Auntie Goth care what happened to her favorite grand-niece, and what of Fudj’s children, of which she had none? It was her singular childlessness that had landed Fudj with the job of looking after Gothi. Gothi’s grand-nephew, her other sister’s son’s lad, him self similarly without children, had escaped the verdict by the sheer luck of being a man. Their family had always been brutishly traditional. It was why Gothi lived alone on top of a mountain. So she had relented and allowed Fudjabit in, but only for the winter; that was the arrangement. The rest of the year Fudj kept her healer’s practice in the village.

Fudjabit shooed the pack of Terrors out the door. The plump red Terror, Smartmouth, complained all the way. He didn’t need to go outside. In fact, he never needed to go outside again. He had overcome the limitations of his bowels. Wedging her boot under his arse, Fudjabit flipped him out the door. His outrage turned to glee, and his bark of fire scattered three other Terrors into the snow. Fudj slammed the door.

“Oo! That’s cold.” She clutched her hat over her ears. “I don’t know why all our great great great great graunties and gruncles wanted to sail north. South seems nice. Wouldn’t that be nice? Maybe next year we should charter a boat south for winter.”

Gothi snorted and twisted the lid on a mixing jar. She shook the draught, stirring it, and held the glass up to the firelight, to see how it settled. Fudjabit sighed.

“You’re right. They’d all die without us. Is everything ready to go?”

Lowering the jar, Gothi rapped her finger on the table to get Fudj’s attention. She circled her hand in a circuitous motion, a swooping ∞, and Fudjabit said, “Oh! The pot!” and darted up the rickety stairs to the cook room. Clucking her tongue fondly, Gothi reopened the jar and began filling six much smaller wooden bottles with the mixture. The smell was rather strong, but not so overwhelming she needed to do it upstairs in the loft, with its shutter-less windows.

Fudjabit reemerged. She set the bowl she’d fetched on a lower step and then closed the ceiling door to the loft. Grimacing, she wafted her hat before her nose. “What a stink! Even with that wind picking up it’s still awful.”

Gothi slapped the bottom of the jar with her open palm, knocking the slimy dregs into the sixth bottle. Grunting, she jerked her chin.

“Oh, aye, it’s picking up for sure.” Holding her hat to it, Fudj pinched her nose as she carried the bowl down the steps. “That calm’s not going to hold. Have you got a towel? Oh, no, I found one.” She covered the bowl with it and tied the towel in place with twine. 

They moved in a casual dance, filling in for one another out of habit. Gothi got the basket while Fudjabit fitted stoppers to the bottles, and as Gothi checked the bowl, Fudjabit began filling the basket. There was a loaf of beer bread warming on the hearth’s bricks; that was meant for the basket. The chief was fond of Gothi’s baking. As she wrapped it, she looked to the door.

“Oh, they’ll be fine,” Fudj scoffed, but she let the Terrors in anyway. Smartmouth was the last through the door, and Fudjabit had to call to him for a few minutes, increasingly strident. “Get in here, you! There’ll be plenty of snow tomorrow. You didn’t want to go out in the first place. What attitude!”

Tossing his head, he breezed past Fudjabit, pointedly ignoring her as he made his way to Gothi. She was tucking the bread in as he hopped up her back, assuming his rightful place on her shoulder. Gothi tipped dangerously. She flicked at Smartmouth’s nose, and Fudjabit lifted him, protesting, from Gothi’s back. A smaller Terror, the itsy babe Spit, wound about Gothi’s ankles.

“You stay down too,” Fudjabit scolded. “You can all squash Auntie later. We have to go. Ingrate!” she called Smartmouth. 

Having clawed to freedom, he stalked to the fire where he curled up and looked mournfully at Gothi. She wagged her finger at him. Smartmouth licked at his eyes and sulked.

“Is that everything?”

It was. Fudjabit hoisted the basket, and Gothi retrieved her staff from the rack, and they linked their arms together to set off down the steep and snowy path. Years ago, after Gothi had claimed the forgotten temple to Eir as her own, she’d set her grand-nephew to shoring the path. Gobber had grumbled about it but he’d set the stones, and he’d fitted them well. The low walls lining the path peeked out of the snow, though the drifts were higher upon them. The path wound down the back of the small mountain, this the mound before the great, sacred mountain still sworn to Odin, and then turned through the trees to come out left of Meade Hall. The chief’s house was but a short walk north from there.

Stoick ushered them in. The lad’s own Terror darted out the door as the chief was closing it. “Ten minutes, wee devil,” Stoick bellowed after it, “then you’re out for good.”

The Night Fury dropped from the rafters. Fudjabit was chattering to the chief of the weather, and her hope that the rest of the fishing boats would come in soon, and wasn’t it shocking, how early winter had come this year, very shocking indeed; all the usual every day prattle meant to set the father of an ill child at ease. Gothi passed the chief her staff and crossed to the boy. The Night Fury stalked alongside her, his eyes huge and watchful, fixed on Gothi and not Hiccup. He meant to protect the boy. 

Not a boy any more, Gothi thought. Not a child, though he looked one in his father’s bed, with the fever stoked. She’d no children of her own but when her sisters had their families Gothi had found she was called on more often than not to tend to the sick ones while her sisters chased after the rest. Brushing the sweaty hair from his brow, Gothi felt his temperature with her wrist. Then she pulled the blankets back to feel for his wrist: to count the pulse and mark the shape of it, whether his pulse was thready or perhaps bubbled. 

Drawing the blankets lower, to expose his chest, Gothi gestured to Fudjabit. Gobber knew the runes, more or less, but Fudj could translate Gothi’s movements. Fudjabit set the basket on the floor. Toothless perched his head and front paws on the footboard, his gaze steady.

“The fever’s higher,” Fudjabit told Stoick, “but his pulse is strong. Even. That’s good.”

“And his lungs?”

Gothi held her hand out to Fudj, who helped her onto the bed. Toothless called softly in his throat, and the chief rested his broad palm on the dragon’s eye ridge. Glancing at the chief, the Night Fury settled, his chin lowering to the bedspread though he continued to watch. Gothi laid her ear to Hiccup’s chest and listened, first at the right breast and then at the left, long minutes at each. As she did so, she cupped her hand over his mouth, to catch his breath on her palm. Her fingers trembled minutely. Fudjabit waited with her hand light at the small of Gothi’s back.

At last Gothi stirred. Gripping Fudjabit’s proffered arm, she allowed her grand-niece to lift her from the bed. Stoick, leaving Toothless, came to help, but Gothi shooed at him. Quickly she tapped at her throat and, making a fist, shook her hand; then she pressed her hand to her breast and ran it gently from right to left. 

“There _is_ a rattle in his breath,” Fudjabit said as Gothi did this, “but there isn’t anything in his lungs. He’s badly congested. And the bruises won’t help with that.”

Stoick’s brow was set low. He nodded curtly and said, “Time will help with those.

Gothi made her way around the bed, holding the edge for balance till she got to Toothless, who blocked the footboard. He dropped from it and stepped clear, allowing Gothi to go on. Then he climbed up again to watch as she bared Hiccup’s stump. Fudjabit hurried to fetch the basket, setting it beside Gothi. 

As she straightened, Fudjabit said, “Do you mind my asking how the bruises happened?”

The chief had come around the bed, following Gothi and Fudj like a very large shadow or a much smaller Night Fury. As he considered his son, beginning to stir as Gothi checked his leg, his gaze sharpened. Gothi glanced at the chief. He was looking at the boy’s throat, where fingerprints stood blackly on his skin, the blood vessels crushed in some powerful and unwavering grip. It was the cold that threatened Hiccup now, cold or the possibility of new infection in his leg. The bruises were what held Stoick.

“It’s not a matter for gossip.”

Fudjabit pinked. “I didn’t mean to—that is, I—”

Gothi clicked her fingers, and Fudjabit, flustered, stooped to pick the bowl out of the basket. Over Fudjabit’s bent back, Gothi looked at her chief. She narrowed her eyes and ticked a finger at him. As a lad—and he was very much a lad to Gothi, as Fudjabit was still a girl—he would have reddened and submitted. The chief firmed his mouth. Just the once, he shook his head.

“Preparing the village for winter comes first,” he said. “When everyone’s settled. Then we’ll deal with other concerns.”

Fudjabit exchanged a glance with Gothi. 

“If you’re worried we’ll talk,” she said, “we won’t. Sir.”

Stoick passed a hand over his beard. His jaw titched. 

“If anyone does ask,” he said. “Give no mention of the bruising. Not yet.” He tugged on a braid, the motion pulling at his cheek. He was looking some place else, somewhere dark. It reflected in him. “The last thing we need now is a panic.”

Bewildered, Fudjabit glanced again at Gothi. Gothi shushed her and resumed rubbing the salve into Hiccup’s stump. He was rousing, and his leg moved, his knee bending as he began to pull from her. Gothi tapped his knee, and Hiccup said, roughly, “What—”

Stoick leaned over the bed. Fudjabit shrank back against the wall, but Gothi stayed where she was. The chief was large enough he could reach over her. Setting his hand on the boy’s chest, Stoick pressed him gently flat and said, “You’re safe, lad. Sleep.”

Hiccup blinked at his father. The movements of his leg slowed. His eyelashes fluttered. He did as his father told him.

Gothi left the chief with the same instructions. Medicine with every meal, and hot soup for a meal, with bread. Each of the six bottles had draught enough for two days. If the storm lingered, they would still have plenty. Wash the leg once in the morning and again at night, and rub the stump with the salve. Clean the sweat from him. Change his bedding every other day if the fever persisted as so. Not all the niblings had survived the sicknesses of childhood, but Gothi thought it likely Hiccup would come through in the end. He’d a robust constitution, and it was only a cold.

As they set off through the snowfall toward the path, Fudjabit said, “Who do you think would have tried to choke the poor boy?”

Gothi shrugged. She was thinking of the chief’s harsh expression, the greater worry neatly tamped down beneath a father’s natural concern for his son. There were few people who hated Hiccup, fewer still who wanted him dead. The trees showed blackly, beautiful in their dark arches, eerie with the ice that glittered along each spiny branch. The evergreens were weighted. Gothi brushed at one with her staff and watched as the snow shivered from it, collapsing with a muted whuff into the drift below. This small cascade left a spattering trail, the crust broken. 

Winter had come very early. Once they had crossed out of the shelter of the trees, Fudj and Gothi were exposed to the wind and the snow, laced with sleet and the promise of worse. Little of the village could be seen. Perhaps if they were lucky they’d time enough between this first storm and the next to secure the village, as Stoick needed done; and there were the fishing boats, too, still at sea. The wind screamed, but Gothi heard not this familiar howl, of a north wind laughing, but the deep crackle of thunder.

“Auntie?”

Gothi startled. Fudjabit frowned at her through the snow, a fretting frown. She shifted the emptied basket closer to her right elbow, so that she could clasp Gothi’s arm, hooked with her left arm. 

“We’re nearly there, Auntie Goth,” said Fudjabit. Strands of her graying hair stuck out here and there from under her hat, the red one Gothi had knit her some six or seven winters ago. She’d wrinkles and broad lines in her features that she hadn’t that day she’d banged on the door and pleaded with Gothi to let her in; she promised she wouldn’t be in the way. The crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes squeezed their toes together. “Would you like me to boil some milk when we get home?”

Resting the staff on her shoulder, Gothi reached over and patted the back of Fudjabit’s mittened hand. Fudj relaxed.

“Milk, then,” she said. “Oh, I was worried for a moment. You looked so far away, Auntie.”

Gothi hadn’t meant to leave her. She patted Fudj’s hand again.

“Don’t worry about me,” Fudj said stoutly. “Let’s get you inside by the fire and see about that milk. Oo, if that Smartmouth’s eaten the other loaf…” 

She needn’t have worried. Gothi had remembered to put it in the bread box, the trick of which Smartmouth had yet to solve. Putting aside memories of her youth and taking her staff once more in hand, Gothi climbed the mountain with Fudjabit, who took care to walk at Gothi’s pace and pattered brightly on about the evening’s meal, and the work to be done throwing cloths over the cook room’s windows, so the snow wouldn’t pile on the floor. 

At the foot of the mountain, the chief let Sharpshot in from the snow and Toothless out. Toothless sniffed at the air, his head high. Before he went about the house to do his work, he turned. His ear flaps rose. 

“I’ll watch him for you,” said Stoick dryly.

Appeased, Toothless chuffed and darted into the gale, a streak of black amidst the white. Stoick stayed at the door, smelling the winter air. He smelled smoke, too, from the chimney, the sweltering, woody smell of a hearth fire rather than the clean, knife-like stink of lightning. His grandfather’s war had ended when Stoick was but a boy, though skirmishes between Witsless and Berk had continued off and on for years, till Stoick’s father and Oswald had resurrected the truce. He wouldn’t have fooled Gothi for long; she was clever, and he owed her much for her cleverness, more for her discretion. It wasn’t the panic that worried him, but the short memory of the young and their eagerness for war; and the knowledge that he had not forged peace with the Berserkers but inherited it; and what Hiccup would say, if war were to come of Dagur.

Toothless was quick about it. He shook the snow off as he slipped in through the door. His tail lashed. He made a yaw-aw-ing sort of sound, a question for Stoick.

“Aye, he’s breathing,” Stoick said, closing the door on the storm. “He won’t have stopped because you left.”

Sharpshot had torn the butt from the loaf of beer bread and run off with it. Stoick picked up the rest and set it on the table beside his bed, on the pile of trousers. His son was peaceful in his sleep, and terribly young. The war with the dragons had been easy for Stoick. He’d never questioned it, not even as Valka argued it with him.

“All I see is killing,” she had flared, “killing dragons. Killing men. All these years of war, and what has anyone got out of it?”

Just as hotly he’d shouted, “I’m protecting our people, Val!”

“And why is it that protecting us means killing them!” 

“Because they’ll kill us!”

“Because we kill them!” she’d yelled.

“To protect you!” he’d raged, and Valka had not recoiled; she had not shouted again. She had only looked at him as if they were separated by an expanse beyond measure. The fury had bled from him. His breath had yet thundered. She was so still. She’d a stillness to her at all times, like the stillness of a bird perched on a branch with its wings poised. Her lips trembled. Only this. 

“I never asked you to kill for me,” she’d said lowly.

“Val,” he’d said. “Val. I…” 

He would not apologize for it. He would have killed a thousand dragons to protect her, a thousand men. He felt the weight of it in his hands, as he reached to brush her shoulder. In the stillness of her face and the unbending line of her shoulders, he saw that she carried this weight too. She had let him touch her then. She let him because she knew what no one else did, and she knew it because he loved her.

And he had loved her. Oh, how he had loved her. Fifteen he’d been when he killed his first man, and Valka twenty-two. The men had called for beer on their ship’s return, beer to celebrate Stoick’s prowess in battle. He’d laughed with them, and he’d shared beer with them, and that night as he sat outside on the cliff over the bay Valka had sat beside him and said, “Are you proud, then?”

He’d been drunk, very drunk, his head so empty and yet full at the same time. Stoick had looked at her. He had loved her then. He had always loved her. Even as a boy, when she was just Spitelout’s older sister, the awkward, gangly daughter of Old Wrinkly Jorgenson’s first wife, he had loved her; as a boy, he’d thought he did. 

“Why’re you here?” Stoick had blurted. 

He had wanted her to say, I saw you; I followed you. Valka had turned from him. His heart battered, a ram against his ribs. She would say it. He’d thought this clearly. She would say it. I followed you.

“I like to watch the dragons,” she said. 

Then she’d glared sidelong at him, as if in challenge. If she had challenged him then, she would have won. Perhaps Stoick had killed a man the week before, but he had also just drank what he thought may have been two kegs of beer.

Stoick swallowed. His mouth was dry. He said, “No.”

“What?” Valka asked, politely.

“No,” he said again. “’m not proud.”

She’d stared at him with the moonlight in her hair and her face so long and so triangular, her cheeks so broad. Spitelout had used to say she looked like a trowel. Her eyebrows pinched. She looked guilty, though he hadn’t understood why, not till later. 

She said, “Stoick,” and then she had touched his arm, as he would one day touch her arm, in wordless apology; and he had—

“Made a fool of myself,” Stoick said to their sleeping son. 

What he’d done was tell Valka he loved her—because it was only then, as she said his name like that, and he had admitted to her what he had, that he realized he did love her after all—and then he had thrown up on her feet.

Stoick reached to lay more evenly the blanket across Hiccup’s shoulders. Briefly, he touched Hiccup’s jaw. The scar on his chin was white in his flushed face, his freckles masked. Hiccup swallowed, and his mouth remained open. He breathed through mouth and nose alike, the sound of it harsh. The bruises framing the column of his throat were dark, the skin swollen. 

“Aye,” Stoick said, “I’m protecting you, son. I mean to do it.” 

How proud she would have been of their little Hiccup, the peace-maker. He had ended the great war, forged an accord between the dragons and Berk. Two splotches showed on Hiccup’s where Dagur had dug his thumbs in a scant half-inch south of the apple, the left thumb stacked on top of the right. A man’s will was not a dragon’s will. A man’s blood was not a dragon’s blood. Stoick breathed through his nose. His jaw firmed.

“And I will,” he said.

*

Before the squall resumed its tantrum, Astrid and the three other teens managed three ditches. They were all of them inelegant, but then, as Snotlout had reminded Fishlegs as they worked on the second ditch: “Who cares if they look crappy? We’re digging them _for_ crap.”

Ruffnut had snickered.

“See?” said Snotlout. “Ruffnut gets me. Right, ba—ffnut?”

His gaze had glanced Astrid. Ruffnut startled and looked down at her chest; her own laugh had surprised her. She grimaced bodily.

“Get yourself,” she snapped, and she slapped the back of Snotlout’s head. Fishlegs jumped when he saw her coming in hot, stalking toward him.

“Hey!” Snotlout righted his helmet. “What’s her deal?” He cut his hand at her.

“I don’t know,” Astrid said truthfully. She did commiserate with him, though, like Ruffnut, she found she didn’t want him to know it. Remembering, too, her promise, Astrid said, “And even if I did, I wouldn’t tell you.”

He protested but he did so to her back, as Astrid had gone to test the earth on the far side of the planned ditch. When he asked of the air what he’d done to deserve being stuck on Berk with _these_ girls, he was careful to mumble it. Astrid, he’d learned, held grudges, and like her brother, Ruffnut believed in exacting retribution where any insult was perceived. Tuffnut would have agreed with him. Snotlout was certain of it. Ruffnut’s short hair might frame her face like thistle-down, but he’d rather her brother’s company. 

Fishlegs called for a stop as Meatlug trundled through the snow. Her hot breath steamed; she panted. The mountain had vanished behind the snowfall. Now even the near houses that overlooked the clearing were reduced to weird shadows. If they stayed out in this, they’d all come down sick, like Tuffnut.

“That idiot’s not sick,” Ruffnut corrected Fishlegs as they walked together through the quickening blizzard, she to Meatlug’s right, he to Meatlug’s left. “He’s just faking because he doesn’t want to work.”

The Ingermans lived in a small house just east of the Thorston clan’s hall with all its sprawling afterthoughts, the houses and lean-tos connected over the years to form a warren. Fishlegs was fortunate: he shared rooms with only his mother, his father, and his younger sister. As they trudged down the long, curling hill, Ruffnut reflected on the unfairness of someone like Fishlegs having his own bed while she had to share a room with all three of her brothers and Nuffnut, too. At least they were moving to the main hall soon. Then she wouldn’t have to share the common room with ten cousins and their parents and all three of her unmarried aunts.

“We _were_ all out in the storm for a long time,” Fishlegs said. “Even Meatlug’s been feeling under the weather, and she’s usually so tough. You know, even when all the other Gronckles had that stomach bug last month, she pushed through it.” He’d started scratching Meatlug’s head and doing that thing with his face again, the goo-goo-baby thing. 

“Ugh,” Ruffnut said. “Could you do that somewhere else? Like… not in front of me?”

Fishlegs stuck his lips out at Ruffnut. “There’s nothing wrong with, with supporting your dragon. They have needs, Ruffnut. Emotional needs, and it’s our responsibility as their trainers and their friends to encourage and support them.” He turned those soft, gooey eyes on Meatlug. “Don’t you ever hug Barf, or tell him what a good job he’s doing, or spend hours polishing his scales till they shine?”

Ruffnut stuck her tongue out and feigned hurking: one, two, three. With the formalities out of the way, she said, “Can a Gronckle even shine? Aren’t their scales, like…” She held her hand out, fingers curled. “The wrong composition or whatever? Of stuff?”

“Oh!” said Fishlegs. He looked at her in surprise. For such a burly Viking-type he had an awful lot of eyelashes. “You _were_ listening to my lecture on differing physiologies—”

Ruffnut vaulted onto Meatlug and politely, Meatlug took a single staggered step. Snarling, Ruffnut slapped Fishlegs across the mouth.

“I was sleeping! And I heard your voice like a—tiny, whiny sprite in my dream.”

Gaping, Fishlegs held his cheek. Then he said, “Get off, Meatlug, you—you nut!” and he thumped her shoulders with his open hands. She barely rocked.

“Ugh!” Ruffnut pulled at her hair. She’d so little of it. Braids were far more satisfying to pull. They ripped at the scalp so. “Hit me, you weenie!”

He’d reddened. That was only the cold. “I don’t want to hit you! Why are you always so gosh darn violent!”

“Be-cause I’m a Vi-king,” she enunciated. What use? Groaning, Ruffnut collapsed against Meatlug. She slid off the Gronckle’s side, every bump and slimy growth thumping Ruffnut as she went. The icy crust overlaying the snow crunched under her feet. Neatly she landed in a crouch. 

“Whatever!” Ruffnut sang. They were outside the hall. “Smell you later, weenie beanie.”

“My name is Fishlegs,” said the tiny, whiny sprite. “You know this. We grew up together.”

Ruffnut shrugged and flapped her arms at the elbows as she ascended the steps. Snow burst around her boots. The steps creaked, and she bounced twice on the top one, curious to see if it might break. It didn’t, and she whirled so quickly she almost lost her helmet. 

“Hey,” Ruffnut said, “didn’t we pass your house?”

“I have to go,” Fishlegs said in a rush, “‘bye, Ruffnut, also you’re crazy.”

“Idiot,” Ruffnut called after him, “you can’t run in snow!”

“Yes, I can!” he shouted back.

She stared at Fishlegs, slowly fleeing. Meatlug smiled at Ruffnut; the Gronckle’s knobbed tongue lolled, and she puffed a steamy cloud as if to say farewell. Then she waddled after Fishlegs, who had made impressive time, all told, though he’d yet to clear the clan’s property. Shielding her eyes, Ruffnut squinted after him. It was nice, she supposed, that he’d walked her home. If he did it again, she’d clock him. Satisfied with this compromise, Ruffnut nodded, held her fist up and beat at the fading Fishlegs as he appeared to her, shrunk so she could pick him up between her fingers and squash him if she liked, and then went inside. 

The hall was warm but she had no time to enjoy it. For the time being her family still lived in the second hall, and Ruffnut had to run to avoid the usual pantheon of well-wishers resigned and envious, and the boot-lickers, who were usually more sincere. She got to the shared common room and out of breath. Their belongings were stacked up in boxes and satchels, nearly ready for the move. In the loft she heard Barf and Belch moving about, snapping at one another. As she huffed, she thought what a fitting farewell to the old place it would be if they lit it up. Beatific at the thought, Ruffnut slapped her knees, pushed, and shoved herself upright.

Any grief she had planned to lay on Tuffnut dissipated at the sight of two things: first, her twin brother bundled with his face fever bright and a napkin stuffed up each nostril; second, all her immediate family lined up one behind the other, seated cozily on the floor.

“You’re braiding without me?”

“You weren’t here,” Tuffnut said. He was horribly smug for someone who sounded as though three frogs had died in his throat.

Ruffnut threw her helmet at him and winged Puffnut, aged ten, instead.

“Hey!” Puffnut clutched at his head. “My head!

“Hey!” said Cuffnut, also aged ten, seated in front of Puff. “My hair! Puff, you’re braiding!”

“You’re traitors, too!” She flashed her teeth and leaned toward them, pointing the first finger of each hand at Puff and Cuff respectively. They rolled their eyes. “And I will never forget you did this, and I will never forgive you.” Then she turned, wailing. “Mo-o-om!”

With her fingers tangled in the intricate wreathing braid she was giving Tuffnut, Glop said, “Well! He’s right! You weren’t here. And you should have seen Puff’s hair. It was a mess.”

“Nuff barfed in it,” said Cuff.

“Did not!” Nuff yelled. She shook her straw doll. “Did not! Did not!”

“Did, did, did too, baby Nuff barfed enough for two!”

“Anyway,” said Mom sharply. All three of the younger ones hushed up. Glop slipped a decorative strand through the knot she was working on in Tuffnut’s hair and finished: “It was time to start and you weren’t here.”

“Because I was out working! Not like Tuffnut,” Ruff said, gesturing rudely.

Tuffnut held a fist to his mouth and coughed. He was grinning. Ruffnut flicked him an escalating succession of rude hand gestures, each nastier than its predecessor, and Cuffnut started laughing; his twin provided harmony.

“Stick those fingers away or I’ll use ‘em as fire sticks,” said Glop.

Flipping her hands about, Ruffnut tucked them behind her. She pouted. “Mo-o-om. You should have _waited_ , at least till I got home.”

“You don’t even have hair anymore,” Tuffnut croaked. His grin had edged into a smirk. “Or did you forget ‘cause your head’s so light now? Like, it’s full of air. Because you’re stupid.”

“Idiot,” said Ruffnut, “faker, cheater, call-out-sick-er—”

“Stop calling your brother names,” said Glop, “he’s sick.”

Ruffnut roared, “He is not sick!” and Tuffnut the First, formally known as Pop, looked up from the even more intricate wreathing braid he was weaving in Glop’s hair to say, “Stop yelling at your mother.”

“How does it look?” asked Glop.

Pop leaned over her shoulder to kiss her lingeringly on her cheek. “As horrid as the day I met you,” he said, and Glop melted against him. As he was significantly the taller of the two, she all but disappeared into his armpit.

“It was a wonderful wedding,” said Glop. 

Pop and Glop had met at their wedding; everything had been arranged by the two families, mostly, Granny Gruffnut said, because if someone didn’t marry Pop, he was going to do something rash, like fall in love. Then he’d have to marry some pregnant girl in the winter. The Cuttlestones had a similar motive, though their premonition was of a pregnant Glop, unmarried. Pretty smooth trick Pop had pulled to fall in love with his wife. Ruffnut wished they’d fallen less in love, maybe three brothers and a baby sister less.

“You’re just a pack of traitors,” Ruffnut said flatly, “piggy-backing traitors, and you make me sick, and I hate you.”

Then Nuffnut, aged three, set aside her straw doll and said, “I’m braid your hair, sissy,” and held up her tiny, pudgy hands.

Ruffnut did not melt. Unlike her mother, who like all the Cuttlestone clan had grown up soft on Berk’s sister islands, Ruffnut was crafted of dirt and spit and little black beetles with the long, squirming legs. None of these were conducive to melting, or to swooning, or to anything like that. She did, however, think that perhaps she was all right with her parents’ lovey-dovey nastiness giving her Nuffnut. Shedding her coat and gloves on the floor as she went, Ruffnut plopped, with her legs out, in front of Nuffnut. Belatedly it came to her.

“Did you call me sissy, like sister,” said Ruffnut, “or sissy, like a wimp?”

Nuff thought. “I forgot,” she concluded. “Sissy, you got no _hair_.” Tuffnut, cackling, choked on his snot.

As Fishlegs walked Ruffnut home, Astrid walked Snotlout home. They did so in silence, each setting their own head into the wind and walking against it. Better to have quit earlier than they had: winter was swift to reassert its rights to Berk. The path was well made, and some enterprising soul had taken the time to clear away the last evening’s snowfall with dragon fire. By the next morning snow would coat and obscure the paths once again, but for now they could navigate it well enough. Astrid steered her thoughts to this. Snotlout’s gait was stiff and stomping. He crushed the snow as if it had offended him.

She’d considered what it would cost to reach out to Snotlout. Certainly Astrid knew the uses of kindness, how to mend a sore with honey. Rather than the benefits, she had thought of how he had used to call her babe and tried to stroke her cheek. While the twins had teased Astrid for her kissing Hiccup, Snotlout had gone from flirting to acting as though he and Astrid were sworn. In the past they had been friends. She supposed it had been friendship. That was very long ago. It hadn’t mattered then to Snotlout that Astrid was a girl. She glanced at Snotlout. It mattered to him now. 

He was a strong fighter, and he was reliable, or not so much reliable as predictable. Somewhere in him he’d a noble streak. He had a talent for seeing through things, though he usually chose not to if what he saw proved inconvenient. He was direct, stubborn; all these characteristics made for someone who, if kicked in the right direction, could prove an able soldier, perhaps one day a real successor to his father and a dependable ally to Hiccup. So why was it Astrid had to give Snotlout that kick?

She hunched her shoulders. Hiccup would be chief. They all knew it would come. He’d make for a fine chief, a good one. Already he’d changed Berk. Let him put the boot in Snotlout’s arse. Snotlout would listen to Hiccup, in as much as Snotlout would listen to anyone but Astrid. He would listen to Hiccup, and he would listen because Hiccup was a boy. Earlier she had thought that perhaps she and Snotlout might be friends again. She saw now how silly it was to care. He’d treated her poorly for years, dismissed her superior skill, condescended to her, called her darling and dear and spoken rapturously of her heart. Whatever friendship they had shared as children they had shared for the same reason any of them had been friends when they were young, an absence of choices. Who else could they play with but one another? It was the same reason she had used to consider Hiccup a friend, when they were young.

Ice blew at her eyes. Her chest had knotted in the low-set arch of her ribs. Clenched, her molars squeaked in her mouth; she heard that sleek grind, passed on through her skull. She forced her jaw to relax. Snotlout wasn’t Hiccup. The only thing she owed Snotlout was the courtesy any person owed any other person who hadn’t tried to murder them. What did she want his friendship for anyway? It was just that it was a bother, she thought, having to navigate his moods. Well, she’d have to ignore them from now on.

The Jorgenson house loomed bleakly. The stylized posts set to either side of the front door leered, a clumsily carved Monstrous Nightmare perched at the top of each pole. Spitelout had done them. “Just as good as your old man’s,” Snotlout had said proudly to Astrid. She’d nearly swallowed her tongue, trying to hold it. 

Snotlout turned to the steps. Astrid pushed on.

“You sure you don’t want me to walk you home?” Snotlout called after her. 

She stopped in the snow and closed her eyes, breathing for calm. If she yelled at him, Ruffnut would find out, and then Ruffnut would tease her for days for hypocrisy.

“I think I can find my own home,” she said. The adjoining “even if I’m not a big, strong man like you” sat sourly in her mouth. “Thanks.” There. Ruffnut could bemoan her as a softie, but Astrid could still lay claim to moral superiority. 

“C’mon, Astrid. It’s snowing really hard, and your mom’s not home…”

She turned, and her foot stuck in the snow, too compacted for her to twist further on her heel. “Give it a rest, Snotlout.”

The snow fell too thickly to tell if Snotlout flushed or what sort of face he made when he said, “I didn’t mean it like—”

Clenched about the shovel’s handle so tightly, her hand hurt. The haft pushed to her palm; her knuckles ached about the unyielding wood.

“Like you always mean it?”

“I didn’t mean it like that,” he said forcefully.

“Then how did you mean it?” she asked. “How, Snotlout? I thought you were done with this. I thought you finally _got_ it. That I finally managed to beat it into your thick skull.” She tapped her finger to her temple. Ruffnut would tease her for sure.

“I just meant,” Snotlout said, “that it’s bad out, and I just didn’t… want…” He floundered.

“Didn’t what?” she said. “You didn’t want what, Snotlout? What is it, exactly, that you _don’t_ want?” 

His hand was at the door. He turned his head from her. “Whatever,” Snotlout muttered, so lowly the wind all but took it. He pushed the door open and was gone.

Astrid stood a moment alone in the snow. Her breath was puffing whitely before her. She was angry, she realized. No, more than this: she was furious. She wanted to take the shovel up in her hands and wield it as she might an axe and smash both the Monstrous Nightmares Snotlout’s father had carved in a poor imitation of the works of Sapstink Hofferson. 

Astrid whirled. She flexed her fingers about the haft of the shovel as she forged through the snow. Tossing the shovel to her other hand, there to repeat the routine with her fingers, Astrid breathed out quickly, too shallow. The force of her anger had shaken her. She wasn’t a child these days, to be controlled by her temper. She commanded her self to breathe deeply; she made her fingers still. Be exact. Be precise. Master this or it will master you. Her thoughts flurried.

Fastfoot was waiting for her at home. The rooms were dark; the hearth fire had gone out. Plaintively he mewled at her. She bent and held her hands out to him, and he leapt to her arms. Clutching her rosy, Sneaky boy to her chest, where her heart was still drumming, Astrid crossed to the hearth. His claws pricked her shoulders. He jumped to sit on top of her head, plucking at the hat with his toes. 

The fire caught. She blew at it, encouraging the flames to eat at the wood. Feeding another length to it, Astrid sat on the floor before the hearth with her knees drawn up to her chest and her arms about her knees. She held her self for a long while, as the fire grew and sparks fizzled out on the hearth stones and Fastfoot rubbed his face along the top of her head, till the trembling had left her. It wasn’t the cold that had her shivering, any more than it was really Snotlout that had loosed her temper in her.

Fastfoot stretched. His front feet came to rest on her shoulder. He kneaded her through her coat and the tunic beneath that. Colors danced in the fire, flickers of white and fleeting blue. The light glimmered on the head of the axe she’d set propped against the wall, the axe Ruffnut had brought Astrid from the training academy. In the morning, before the unseen sunrise, Astrid had cleaned the axe and done it thoroughly. Nothing could clean away the score that ran along the metal, but the blood had come off. She hadn’t washed her new coat yet. Clothes were trickier. Soiled once with menses blood, a pair of drawers kept the stain. A person wasn’t clothing; she knew that. Her hands were clean. Sweaty from the day’s work, and cold, but they were clean.

Astrid lifted her head from her knees. She picked Fastfoot up, one hand under his belly and the other at his side. He complained at being taken from his favorite spot, on top of someone’s head, but he caved readily when she tucked him to her chest again.

“Mom won’t be home probably for another couple days,” she told him. “So it looks like we’re on our own. That means I’m going to be doing all the cooking around here for a while.”

His head nestled to her breast, Fastfoot purred. Astrid relented; no one else was about. She dipped to kiss his brow.

“That’s my Sneaky,” she said. “You love my cooking, don’t you? You want a big, frothy mug of yaknog to wash down all those yummy meatballs you’re going to eat.” 

She tickled his chin, and Fastfoot’s purring thickened into a long and rumbling sigh. He bit her armpit affectionately. Astrid set him to the ground so she could strip off her winter gear, coat and gloves, hat then boots. She kicked the boots to the door and then walked shivering to the icebox, to dig out the meat Hekja had packed in snow yesterday while Astrid was visiting with Hiccup. Busy hands make for clear heads; that was what her mother said. If something’s bothering you, work until you’re too tired to think. She rolled the meatballs between her hands, shaping them. She’d forgot the seasoning again, though she’d remembered to throw salt into the center of each patty before rolling them up. 

“Well, that’s not really important,” Astrid said. Silly, to dress something up when it was fine just the way it was. She tossed the meatballs into the pan and slid the pan on the rack in the hearth. Her hands smelled of raw meat, and she sniffed at her fingers then blanched. She looked at her hands and then the meatballs slowly cooking over the flames. 

Fastfoot whistled at the fire and paced along the hearth. 

“Here,” Astrid said, and she offered him her hands to lick. He did so avidly, dancing his wings as he nipped at her palm. His butt quivered; his tail whipped. Again he nipped her in his excitement. “Watch it,” she warned Fastfoot, but she tickled his chin as she scolded. 

Old Dog had wiggled, too, when she gave him treats, though he’d never nipped her. He hadn’t teeth enough for nipping. The memory surprised her. She wondered how she had forgotten this, and when she’d lost it; why it had returned to her now, as Fastfoot sat back on his haunches and licked his chops, his long tongue flipping like a frog’s. He was purring again. To be loved like this, she thought. 

Astrid bent. She enveloped Fastfoot in her arms, hauling him squawking from the hearth. 

“Good boy,” she said fiercely. She kissed his nape twice as he struggled. “Sneaky boy. Clever, sneaky, good boy.”

Planting a foot in her chest, her Sneaky pushed out of her arms. She laughed, touching her chest where he’d shoved at her. With his eye fixed on her, Fastfoot circled warily, going first one way and then reversing to pace the other. Cautiously he stepped toward her. His tongue darted out, licking a scrap of meat from the corner of his mouth. 

“Well?” said Astrid. She folded her arms.

His mind made up. Fastfoot yawned and glanced lazily at the wall, and then, still making a show of not caring, he hopped onto her lap. 

“Pretty crafty,” she said. He thought so. 

Astrid petted him in the silence. The fire warmed her back. Fastfoot’s smoky breath warmed her side. The soreness in her shoulders unraveled. Here in her mother’s house she was Astrid and only that. Fastfoot yawned, showing off the back of his throat. He turned about in her lap. Gathering him carefully, Astrid turned as well and laid on the bricks with Fastfoot settling on her tummy.

How much she owed Hiccup for this. She hadn’t lied that day on the cliff, as they watched the ships sailing to the dragon’s nest. If she’d found Toothless in the wood she would have killed him. He liked to be scratched under his fins and anywhere at all around his throat. She would have slit that throat from this corner of his jaw to that. If you tickled his elbows, Toothless batted at you to stop. He hated to be touched there by anyone, even Hiccup, though he’d once abided Astrid squeezing his elbow as a joke.

She would have done it.

Fastfoot yawned again and wriggled up her torso so he might pillow his head on her bust. He gazed at her and rumbled. The weight of him impacted her chest. Stroking his spiny nape, Astrid thought of the bloodied axe. If she had killed the dragon in the wood, she thought, what would it have meant to her? Dagur’s blood had painted her mouth. She’d rolled her lips, forgetting, and tasted it. Her stomach turned. That huge dragon had sung softly at Hiccup. She hadn’t tasted its blood. The spray darkened her chest, not her face. 

In the old tradition, you were to cut out the heart of the first dragon you killed and offer it to an elder, who would offer it back. Eat the dragon’s heart and you will be of the tribe: not a child of your clan, adjunct to your elders, but an adult sworn to Berk. If she had killed Toothless, she would have cut his heart out and brought it to her mother. Before the assembled tribe, she would have consumed it raw, muscle and fat and blood. She had dreamed of it for years, that moment in the ring when she would kill the Monstrous Nightmare for her family name, for her own name, for its heart.

Sometimes now the dream came to her, and in it Hiccup stood opposite her, watching as she cut the arteries holding the muscle in the dragon’s breast. He never said anything in that dream. He only watched her. It didn’t matter that in the dream she no longer wanted to eat the heart; she had to do it anyway. They were all waiting to see what the niece of Finn Hofferson would do. She offered the heart to Hiccup. He took it from her. The blood dripped between his fingers. He looked to the heart, cupped in his hands, and there was such sadness in him. What he wanted didn’t matter either. He offered the heart to Astrid. She took it from him, and then she ate it.

Fitfully Astrid dozed. The bricks were hard upon her; her head began to ache. She faced the fire. A blue spark flicked out. It stung her hand, gone still on Fastfoot’s back. Astrid studied the fire and thought, as she had not thought in years, of that moment in the arena when Stormfly had closed in on Astrid and Hiccup, and Astrid had picked up her axe, embedded to the haft in Hiccup’s shield, and struck her full across the face. Not Stormfly then but just a Nadder. Astrid’s breath had shaken in her throat. Her skin jittering. She’d looked in the Nadder’s mouth and seen the sparks, white as stars. 

Reflecting on it, Astrid could no longer recall if it was only the nearness of her own death that had disturbed her. Stormfly had grown too dear. In looking back now she thought: she had struck Stormfly. The shield had cracked to three pieces on Stormfly’s jaw. The Nadder staggered; she fell away to her knees. Gobber took the beast to her cage. Astrid had survived. The Nadder, too.

Astrid laced her fingers together at the base of Fastfoot’s head. Sleepily he peeped at her. It passed before her, a thought of what Berk would have remained if it weren’t for Hiccup, of what Astrid would have been or become. She would have killed him, too. Astrid traced the shape of his brow with her thumbs. The beating of her own heart, and the rushing of her blood, and the crackling of the fire right next to them all conspired to obscure it, but distantly she could feel his heartbeat, twice as quick as her’s. Fastfoot nuzzled her. His snout settled at her collarbone, the heat from his breath ghosting along her throat. 

Lifting his head but a smidge from her chest, Fastfoot scented the air. His head lifted higher with interest. Meat was charring. The meat was charring. Dinner was charring.

Astrid shot up, swearing. Her Sneaky tumbled, yelping, to the floor. As he hissed at Astrid, she cast about for cloths to protect her hands. Of course she hadn’t thought to carry any from the drawer to the hearth. She grabbed the fire tongs instead and used those to snatch the pan off the cooking rack. Three smoking meatballs plopped into the fire where they smoked in earnest. 

Fastfoot lunged for the lost meatballs and scattered hot embers in his wake, most on the bricks, several on the wood floor. Swearing again, Astrid dropped the pan on the bricks—more meatballs lost as they bounced over the low sides—and stamped at the embers in her stocking feet. The one hunk of wood Fastfoot had knocked free, she kicked to the chimney, against which it exploded in triumph. Fastfoot burped.

Astrid’s chest was heaving; the breath came short. Her left sock smoldered. Peeling it, she beat the sock on the bricks till it no longer smoked. On his way out of the fire, Fastfoot looked her over. His scales glowed wonderfully. 

“Go ahead.” She flung her hand toward the meatballs cooling on the floorboards. The sock flapped against her wrist. “Chow down. You only almost burned the whole house down. During a blizzard.”

Still eyeing her as though she were the odd one, Fastfoot deigned to gobble up the floor meat. Astrid plopped onto the bricks. She felt meatball-ish herself. She tossed the sock; it crumpled at the wall. Three meatballs had graciously stayed in the pan. They’d burned to it.

“Oh,” said Astrid, remembering. “You’re supposed to grease that first.” She always put too much oil in, though, and then they were soggy. 

Astrid yanked a meatball from the pan. The burned bottom ripped. Well, that meant less char she had to pick away. Flicking ash from her fingers, she took a large bite. She hadn’t eaten since morning. She wished she hadn’t eaten this. Holding her hand to her mouth, Astrid turned left then right. She made do with spitting into the fire. Fastfoot keened.

It wasn’t salt she’d folded into the patties, but the coarse flour Hekja insisted on grinding, to save on money and what of Da’s carved goods they held in reserve for important trade. Practice makes for perfection, Da had told Astrid when she was learning to handle an axe. Astrid pitched the rest of the meatball to Fastfoot and then gave him the pan. She nudged it over with the tongs. Twittering at her—he’d forgiven her the wasted mouthful—he curled up on the hot pan and relished the last of her dinner.

Astrid huffed. She didn’t know why she had such trouble with cooking, but then, she thought sourly, she did know: she didn’t enjoy it, so she didn’t bother. She was going to start bothering. How humiliating to be so awful at something she couldn’t even Snotlout her way through it, convincing herself she was adequate. Unseeing, Astrid watched Fastfoot eat. She’d made that resolution before.

Fastfoot had coiled, with only the end of his tail left out of the pan. The tip flicked. Spitelout had carved the Nightmares with their long tails wrapped each in a single, mostly even circle about the posts. The descending spirals Sapstink had used in his work had proved too complicated for a man who preferred to hurl cabers rather than shape them.

As a child Astrid hadn’t the patience for whittling. More fun to her mind to watch Hekja work with an axe.

“Too much like your mother,” Da had said. He’d sighed and let his shoulders droop. “Well, it’s for the best. I need you big, strong women to protect me.” He grabbed Astrid and goosed her as she laughed at him to stop embarrassing her.

“It’s only me seeing it,” said Hekja, “and there’s no stopping your father when he means to embarrass you.”

Da held Astrid with his arms folded across her chest, elbows in her armpits. Her legs dangled off his lap. She’d gone ragdoll so he’d weep for his dear, lost daughter, his only bairn, taken too soon.

“I could never embarrass you.”

Mom repressed a smile. “Not since I’ve cut off your drink.”

Puzzled by this—she’d never seen Sapstink drink more than the light beer everyone drank—Astrid looked up at her father’s chin as he laughed. Hekja had given up on squashing her smile. Da took a deep breath.

“Oh, my dear and burly maid,” he bellowed, and Astrid near jumped out of her skin in surprise, “with hands so strong and breasts so wide—”

“The girl’s here.”

Da said, “Well, she knows what they are,” and then he was caterwauling again: “Your lusty wishes I obey, my efforts all to satisfy!”

“Cover your ears,” Hekja told Astrid. She did so gladly. Da’s profound voice translated poorly to song; he always affected a falsetto.

“But how now can I ask us to be wed, when all your love has broke my bed!” He bounced Astrid on his knee. “All right. I’m done. It’s safe to uncover your ears.”

“I’m taking the girl home to Freezing-To-Death,” said Hekja.

Sapstink nodded. “Aye, that’s fair. She takes after you so.”

“I’m never going to Freezing-To-Death!” Astrid had rebutted. “Never!”

Hekja had looked, bemused, to Sapstink, and he’d laughed and bounced Astrid again. “Oh, she’s just teasing,” said Da, “your mother would miss my singing too much.”

No one had ever said it to her that she could remember, but Astrid had known that her parents were a strange match. A farmer’s third son, a cut-up who was always laughing, and a harsh warrior woman who had fled Freezing-To-Death because she hadn’t wanted to marry: an improbable love match. Perhaps in time they would have drifted apart. Perhaps Astrid would have had a younger sibling or two. Sapstink was twelve years dead. If Hekja missed his singing, she hadn’t told Astrid. Astrid hadn’t asked.

If she married Hiccup, she thought. Astrid stood up and got the broom, thinking: busy hands, clear heads. She swept the soot and ash and leftover scraps of meat Fastfoot had missed, and brushed the pile to sit by the door. Her head wouldn’t clear. What sort of match would she make with Hiccup? They worked well together, but then, she worked well with Fishlegs, too. She could imagine what Hiccup would say: oh, a professional working relationship, that’s the height of romance right there. 

She shouldered the front door open and held it in place with a foot on the inside, so the wind wouldn’t knock it to the wall. The snow had piled up a half foot, too high to sweep the grit out. Scowling, Astrid slammed the door. The wind made it tricky; the door more whuffed than slammed. She rested the broom on the wall.

“He’s too nice,” she said, “and I’m too mean.”

Fastfoot had no opinion.

“And who’s to say he wants to marry me anyway?” Astrid continued. “Or that I want to marry him? Just because I’ve kissed him doesn’t mean I want to be Mrs Haddock.” 

The details of how Hekja and Sapstink had met were vaguely known to her. Her mother’s discretion and Astrid’s focus on establishing herself had ensured that. What she did know was that her mother had been born on Freezing-To-Death, and then she’d married a man on Berk and never gone back. After Sapstink’s death, Hekja was free to return to her father’s clan. She’d chosen instead to stay on Berk with the daughter she’d given the Hofferson clan. 

If Astrid married Hiccup, she would join the Haddock clan. There were, of course, exceptions: Fishlegs’ father had immigrated from one of the unclaimed islands and joined the Ingerman clan through _his_ marriage. No chief would wed into someone else’s family. It would muddle the succession and violate several strongly worded traditions. Astrid would hardly expect Hiccup to swap his family’s legacy for the Hoffersons. She would have hit him if he’d suggested it.

She’d kissed Hiccup at Snoggletog two winters ago, her hands cupping his jaw that she might tip his chin just so. How warm his lips had been, how much warmer the startled breath that spilled between them. His fingers curled against her back. She embraced him. The ends of his hair, ever messy, brushed her cheek. She had wanted to kiss the side of his neck. It wouldn’t have been more than the simple act of turning her head and leaning forward. 

Some days later as she was leaving the forge—her face red, but she hadn’t turned it down or hid her smile—one of the older lads in the village, Dogsbreath, had laughed. She hadn’t thought he laughed at her till he said, “Looks like Astrid’s ready to trade up. Got to get rid of that Finn Hofferson somehow,” to a friend. His friend had the presence of mind not to laugh. After she’d broken Dogsbreath’s nose, he hadn’t laughed either.

The honor she had restored to the Hofferson name wouldn’t leave with her; but all her accomplishments after would bear the Haddock name. And so? She belonged to the Hofferson clan by virtue of her father’s blood; it was his name, given to her. Of her acquaintances, only Fishlegs bore his mother’s name, and his mother’s name had been his grandfather’s before it was hers. She had it set out neatly. There was no reason to object on these grounds. A name was only a name. It could not change her. 

Uncle Finn had come to stay a time after her father died, to look after Astrid when her mother was at sea. He played games with her and ate with her and taught her a trick to skipping rocks that carried the stones out five skips at least. 

“Is my mom going back?” She knelt on the shore, picking through rocks. “To Freezing-To-Death?”

He’d tossed a rock, weighing it. “I don’t think so. She’s a Hofferson.”

“Not anymore,” Astrid said. She tossed a rock at the water. The surf swallowed it.

“Once a Hofferson,” said Uncle Finn, “always a Hofferson. Watch this.” The stone skipped nine times and slipped beneath the water.

When he’d gone too, some wit stole the tune to a popular chanty and replaced the words with the ones the twins had loved to throw at her. There was no one who could fight like a Hofferson. She’d proved it to them. She’d proved it again, to everyone, and then again. As often as she had to prove her worth she had done so, till they couldn’t throw that song at her any more. It was more than her worth she had to prove; it was the whole of her clan. Finn had been brother to her father. His blood was her blood. Regardless of whether she married or who she married, she would remain Astrid. All her deeds were her deeds, whatever her clan. Hiccup couldn’t claim them nor would he if he were able. Their children—she’d an odd rush at that, a swooping in her gut like falling—would be Haddocks, not Hoffersons.

And if they weren’t suited for one another, she thought. If she was too hard and he was too soft, if he wanted more of her than she had to give, if whatever had existed between them no longer existed: how did love last? Was it love? She thought again of Hiccup looking to her with Dagur choking at him. He’d looked at her as though he had prayed for her. She thought of how she could not look to see how he looked at her as she stepped over Dagur’s corpse. If he had prayed for deliverance, then she had delivered. He had ended the war with the dragons, and in the end she had given him an act like of war.

“Thor in a bridal dress,” Astrid groaned, “what is wrong with me?” Thinking of marriage! Thor could keep the bridal dresses. It was a silly thing to think of when there were so many other concerns. All the what ifs and might bes were just fancies, and they offered nothing she’d use for. How was she to know if Hiccup even cared for her like that these days? He never acted it. She knew she hadn’t acted it in ages, and she was all right with that. What they were was fine.

She brushed at her hair, sweeping her bangs before her eyes. Her head was pushed down, a weight on it. Fastfoot kneaded her scalp and chirped his opinion. 

“I just need something to do,” she said. 

The trouble was she hadn’t anything to do. Hekja had got the house properly kitted for winter, and Astrid had emptied the hen house that morning, shooing the chickens into the back room and cordoning the rooster in a pen. They’d food stores to last the month; with most of the clan on the farms, they could go out to replenish their food stuffs when they’d need to. If Astrid had gone with her mother to the farms, she’d plenty to busy her hands. She’d other things on her mind in the morning when Hekja invited Astrid to come along with her. Astrid had demurred. While the rest of Berk gossiped, Hekja held her peace, and if she suspected Astrid meant to visit Hiccup, she kept her suspicions private. The relationship between her daughter and Hiccup had served as fodder for the chatter-mouths for years. Even if Hekja did not gossip, she was sure to have heard it.

Hekja had raised her eyebrows. “Then I’ll leave Stormfly with you.”

“No, take her,” Astrid said. “You shouldn’t have to saddle a dragon from the stables. She’ll take you there faster than any of them could. Isn’t that right, girl?” Stormfly had preened and gladly accepted Astrid’s scritches along her crest.

Now Stormfly and Hekja were stranded at the farm while the storm raged. Astrid’s intentions of visiting Hiccup had come to nothing. Spitelout had knocked at Astrid’s door while she broke her fast and told her to get the rest of the teens together; they were on the ditch detail. Perhaps the snow fell roughly enough that her mother’s return to the village was out of the question. Astrid hadn’t left the village. She’d walked to her house through the snow; she could walk to the chief’s. 

Drawing the braid over her shoulder—hair sticking out and some of the loops looser after a day’s wear—Astrid unplaited her hair and jogged up the stairs. She’d change before leaving. Might be wise, too, to pack a change of clothes if the chief exhorted her to sit tight through the night. Her room was dark. With her hair half-undone and hanging from her shoulder, she bent to strike the flint and light the candle. Fastfoot stood blinking in the doorway, his eyes adjusting. He caroled. 

“You can come with me,” Astrid said. She felt under her bed for a satchel. “You want to see Sharpshot?”

A thump on the bed: he’d leapt up, the better to peer at her. The better to claim her bed as his, more like. He watched as she stripped by candlelight and dressed again. The braid had her hair segmented and waving, three currents at odds with one another now that she’d unbound them. She brushed her hair and then braided it anew to the side so it remained at her shoulder. The knot thumped the beginning swell of her breast. Biting her lip, Astrid touched the braid and hesitated, ready to untie the knot. She left it as it was. 

Her shadow hung on the wall, distorted by the jutting window casing. The shutters were rattling. She packed one outfit and then a second.

“I’d rather be overpacked than underpacked,” she told Fastfoot, but he’d drifted into a light sleep. She fixed the satchel’s flap to the front then crept on to the bed.

Fastfoot mewled as she rubbed his sides. He stretched, his front legs sticking out before him. 

“Ready?” She tucked her fingers into his belly and squeezed a snap out of him. “You can sit in my hood, lazy. Come on.” He latched his claws in the quilt as she pulled. “Up. Up. Good boys who get up get yaknog.” The bed was preferable. 

Downstairs, the door whuffed. Astrid lifted her head. The wind was in the house; then the door closed again. 

Abandoning the bed to Fastfoot, Astrid stood at the top of the stairs.

“Mom?”

Hekja paused, unwinding her scarf. She held one end out from her throat. Her cheeks were rosy red, blistered from wind. At her back, squished against the wall, Stormfly shook snow from her wings and her crest.

“What are you doing home?” Her fingertips on the wall for balance, Astrid descended. “I thought you were staying with Aunt Sticktongue.”

“Oh, they didn’t need me to stay.” Hekja hung her scarf on the rack and thumped Stormfly’s shoulder. “They got everything well covered. We’d have just got in the way.”

“That isn’t what I meant,” Astrid said. “It’s storming out there. Or didn’t you notice?”

Hekja crouched to untie her boot laces. “It is bad, isn’t it? A real howler and it still September.”

Stormfly wandered to the foot of the stairs, to nose Astrid and chirp sweetly at her. Catching Stormfly’s snout, Astrid smoothed her hands along Stormfly’s jaw. Stormfly twittered and nosed her again. Her beak closed gently on Astrid’s braid; she gummed it. So much for neatening her hair.

“You shouldn’t have gone out,” Astrid scolded her mother. “It isn’t safe to be outside in a blizzard.”

Grunting, Hekja popped the second boot off. “And what are you all dressed up for, hm?”

Astrid looked down her front. She’d changed into a long-sleeved tunic embroidered about the collar with red flowers, a motif that continued in a straight line from her collar to the hem where it ended over her thighs. Her leggings were dark red, plain. There was nothing remarkable about what she’d chosen to put on. Astrid stuck her chin out.

“Who’s dressed up?”

“You are,” said Hekja. 

“I’m not dressed up.” Astrid tugged on the tunic, straightening it over her breasts. The cut of the tunic, drawn in by a few careful stitches under her arms, accentuated her bust. She hadn’t noticed. Fussing with her braid, now sticky with Stormfly’s spit, Astrid affected that she hadn’t noticed it now. “After working the whole day, I just wanted to put something else on.”

“Working, hm,” said Hekja. She looked at Astrid with something nearly soft in her eyes. “Not much time to do what you’d like to with the village needing tending.”

Astrid rolled her shoulder and went to Hekja’s back, to help her remove her thick coat. Intrigued by the lingering smell of burnt meat, Stormfly sniffed at the fireplace.

“Work’s work,” she said. Hekja shucked the coat from her shoulders and Astrid pulled at the sleeves. “Someone has to do it. Can you imagine if Snotlout was left in charge?”

“I’d rather not,” said Hekja.

“My thought too. And Spitelout would have left Snotlout in charge, too, if I didn’t go down there.”

“And what did the general Jorgenson have you doing?” Hekja turned, accepting the coat from Astrid. She shook it open over her arm and went to lay it across the bricks before the fire. Stormfly danced out of Hekja’s way.

“Oh, glamorous stuff,” Astrid said. She clicked her fingers and Stormfly came chittering to her, eager to tell Astrid of her day. “Digging ditches, mostly. For the dragon waste? So Aunt Sticktongue and everyone can fertilize their farms in spring. We only finished three, though. We might have managed four if the others could have stopped picking on each other. And Tuffnut was home sick, so we were down one.” She studied Stormfly’s chin, the few spots of fresh grime stuck between her scales. A good scrub-down was very much in order.

“Caught cold, did he?” Hekja glanced at Astrid. Her voice gentled. “Well. I’m sure he’ll be all right.”

Astrid picked dirt from Stormfly’s scales and went on. “Ruffnut’s sure he’s faking.” 

“Surely not.”

“He _is_ Tuffnut.”

“Then you can give him a good thump on the head,” said Hekja, “when the storm’s settled.”

It had of course been irresponsible to think of going out alone in the storm. She would have taken Fastfoot; but he was a very small dragon, and the cold did make him dozy. Ten feet from the front door Astrid would have realized how reckless it was to walk into a blizzard and cross half the village just to see if Hiccup was managing his cold, and she would have turned around.

Stormfly leaned against Astrid and picked at her braid, drawing it delicately through her beak. Astrid smiled at Stormfly.

“Right,” she said. “It’d be pretty stupid to go outside now. _You_ did, but…”

Hekja flicked Astrid’s nose. “I could hardly leave you to starve.”

Astrid followed Hekja to the cupboards, arranged about the icebox and the trap door that led to the cellar. “Please. I wouldn’t _starve_. You did teach me how to start a fire. Remember? Any idiot can cook meat.”

“Mm,” said Hekja. She popped the trap door. “Burn it, too. Cabbage, carrots, and three eggs. Do you want sheep or cod?”

Accepting defeat with dignity, Astrid said, “Sheep. Stormfly would like cod.”

“Cod for the dragon, and sheep for the girl,” said Hekja. “What of Fastfoot?”

“He’s already eaten,” said Astrid.

“I suspected,” said Hekja.

Astrid made a face at her mother’s head. Her mother put her to work chopping the vegetables and preparing the tools. A pot filled with snow made for water after Stormfly spat into it. Steam burst in Astrid’s face and she winced, leaning back as she hooked the pot over the fire. Thoughts of anything else were not forgotten; rather she set them aside. 

“Not linseed oil,” Hekja said. “Rappaseed!”

“They taste the same!”

“They taste nothing the same!” said Hekja, and Astrid was again relegated to cutting cabbage.

Evening came, then night. Astrid retired to her room, as Hekja retired to her room. The candle had gone out, and Astrid was obliged to light it again. Fastfoot had left the bed to sleep instead on the satchel, which he had knocked on to its side. The latch had come open and the sleeve of a blue tunic, embroidered with white stars, had untucked. The shutters were no longer rattling, but the wind was yet crying. Astrid listened to it. The wind sounded as though it were lonely. It would always be so.

She shooed Fastfoot off the satchel. Grumbling he resumed his place on the bed. Stormfly was fitting through the door. She greeted Fastfoot; he welcomed her. Kneeling on the chilling floorboards, Astrid shook out each tunic, each set of leggings, her skirts; she folded them tidily, and then she put them away. No sense in leaving the bag out when she had no need of it. 

Astrid pinched the wick between her fingers. The room darkened. Fastfoot made room for her on the bed. Curled up on the floor, Stormfly called to Astrid. She was restless in the dark without her flock to soothe her. 

“It’s all right,” Astrid said. “It’s only for a few days, Stormfly. You’ll see them again soon.”

Stormfly called again; then sighing, she was quiet.

Astrid petted Fastfoot’s head and thought what a comfort it was not to be alone. Her chest ached. She closed her eyes and curled about Fastfoot and waited for comfort to come.


	3. Two

Most of the soldiers with whom Gerda had sat scattered upon Aghit’s sitting at the table. They wouldn’t have thought it scattering, such burly folk as they were, but a discrete and tactical withdrawal; they’d scattered. Gerda, still in good humor, cast her eye down and then peeked at Aghit, seated across from her.

“I’m not in trouble again, am I?”

“Are you?” asked Aghit.

Gerda sighed and picked at her plate, turning the dredges of her meal over with a knife’s flat. “I am in trouble.”

Aghit crossed her legs at the knee and sorted her skirts so they’d lie smoothly. “And whyever should you think you’re in trouble?”

“You have that look on your face,” said Gerda. “The sour look.” She tapped the knife to the corner of her own mouth and said softly, “You’re pinching.”

“How wonderful,” said Aghit, “that your eyesight is good enough to make out these important details. Your eyesight _is_ good enough, isn’t it?”

Sucking her lip in, Gerda gave Aghit a woeful hang-dog sort of look. She’d pulled her shoulders in too and hunched, but of course Gerda was so large that if Aghit hadn’t scolded her as a girl for tracking mud and known it to be a habit, this trying to make herself smaller, she would have thought Gerda to be mocking.

“I’m sorry,” Gerda said. “I forgot.”

“Oh, yes,” said Aghit, “you did forget. Two days you forgot. Stop making that face at me. You can’t make me feel badly for you, not when it’s your own fault. And sit up straight.”

Sighing again, Gerda relaxed her shoulders and straightened. Some of the hunch remained, but that had little to do with trying to make Aghit more comfortable with Gerda’s hugeness. Gerda picked at her food again. Terrible Terror, if Aghit knew the smell of it; she did. Her nose wrinkled. Terrors made for tough meat with an over-ripe flavor, but they were plentiful, especially in the winter months when, like other small pests, they made for the indoors.

“I didn’t mean to forget.”

“Of course you didn’t mean to forget. You won’t forget if it infects.”

Gerda set her elbow on the table and rested her chin on the back of her wrist. “You didn’t have to scare them away.”

“What did I do? I sat down,” said Aghit.

Her eye creased. Gerda smiled: a little crinkly thing that she kept well-contained. Spearing a long, thin scrap of Terror, she popped it in her mouth. She offered the last scraps to Aghit, but Aghit fluttered her fingers at Gerda, shooing. Gerda shrugged and ate those scraps, too. She did her chewing on the left side of her mouth. What of the right half of her face showed from beneath the bandage was motionless, serene in its composure. Aghit tapped a finger to Gerda’s mug and pushed it to her. Bobbing her chin in thanks, Gerda took the drink up and drained it.

The mug clicked on the table. Gerda wiped at her lips and said, “What?”

“What ‘what’?” said Aghit.

Gerda ticked her little finger on her cheek. “You were smiling.” She smiled fleetly her self, another repressed twitch.

“If I was smiling,” Aghit said, “it was only because for once I found you socializing. Not working. Not hiding.”

She’d gone to the great hall last, with no expectation of finding Gerda there. The chief took her meals alone, as she had taken most of her meals alone before she was chief, alone but for Aghit or the late Oswald, though he’d rarely time for Gunnvor’s second child. Dagur certainly had not welcomed Gerda to his table at the great hall. So Aghit, half-convinced she’d find Gerda buried in a drift somewhere, had found it a shock to find Gerda not only in the great hall, but at a table with a group of soldiers, a small group, but multiple persons nonetheless. The woman sitting next to Gerda had laughed and looked at Gerda and then laughed harder, as though Gerda had said something clever just before Aghit spotted them. Gerda hadn’t laughed but she’d been smiling in her shy way.

“I helped Hugdis and the lads with the boats a few nights ago,” Gerda said.

“They helped you.”

A wrinkle lined Gerda’s left eyebrow. “They were already bringing them to shore when I offered.” 

Aghit looked beseechingly to the rafters. “You’re chief now, Gerda. Anything you do now, that’s your doing. Once you’ve joined the line, you lead it.”

Gerda frowned. She glanced to her plate, but there was nothing left for her to pick at or stick in her mouth for something to do. You were such a sweet girl, Aghit thought; and she cleared her throat.

“That boy was by again looking for you.”

Gerda’s eyebrow wrinkled again. Her head tipped. At a table farther from the great hall’s immense fire pit, someone—another soldier, as the great hall fed mostly soldiers—shouted with laughter.

“What boy?”

The temptation to pinch her nose rose in her. Keeping her hands in her lap, Aghit said, “The same boy who’s come by every week to speak with you, because for some reason the chief is never at the chief’s house for clan heads to speak with her.”

“Oh,” said Gerda. The wrinkle remained. The swell of her bottom lip pudged.

Aghit threw her hands up. “Hemming! Hemming. It’s Hemming.”

“Oh,” said Gerda again. Her face had cleared.

“Yes, ‘oh,’” said Aghit. “Do you know what I told him? What I told him the last time he came looking for you and you weren’t anywhere. That you were at your father’s tomb, so he’d go back to his own house.” 

Perhaps Aghit ought not have mentioned Oswald. The chief lowered her eye. The knife turned in her grip; she pinched the blade between her fingers, by the flat. An uncharitable fury pecked at Aghit’s throat. She swallowed, that it would go into her gut. Where had the girl’s father been to look after his daughter? Chief, famed peace-maker, and yet he had never noticed the war ground in his own home. The young head of the Roald clan had come to the healer’s hall in search of Gerda because everyone knew this was where Gerda went when Dagur had rounded on her.

Oswald had been chief; he had been Aghit’s chief. His motives were not hers to understand. Looking across the table at Gerda, her head bandaged and her hair a rough fuzz, Aghit could not forgive him. What did it matter if she forgave Oswald? He was chief, and he was dead.

“And here I find you,” Aghit said, “laughing with soldiers.”

Gerda turned the knife about in her hands. Her eye flicked. She glanced at Aghit and then her attention returned to the blade she worried.

Aghit leaned forward against the table. She lowered her voice. “He’s head of the Roald clan. If he seeks an audience with you, you must listen. You can’t afford to ignore him.”

“I know,” Gerda said. She set the knife on the plate and then nudged it so it lay evenly across the middle, dividing the plate into halves. No one familiar with both Gerda and Dagur could mistake either of them for each other, but they shared a mother and a father. If Gerda set her jaw as she did then, the similarity—offset by the disparate ways in which they carried them selves, Dagur with his chest out and Gerda trying to fold in upon her chest—showed plainly.

“He’s only worried for you.” She said it lightly, but they were neither of them ignorant, whatever the gossip of Gerda’s wits.

Gerda snorted. Her nose whistled. Flushing, she set her fingers on the side of it. After a moment, she lowered her hand.

“Hemming is…” Her lips rounded as she thought. Absently Gerda touched her head, brushing at her right temple, hidden beneath the protective bandaging. “Enamored with his own voice.”

“That may be,” said Aghit dryly, “but as he’s also the head of the most powerful clan on Witsless, you’d do well to listen to his voice.”

Gerda folded her arms on the table and leaned into them. Another trick to downplay her largeness, thought Aghit, but there were too many people about in the great hall for Aghit to get away with swatting Gerda’s arm and making her sit up properly. And why had it fallen to Aghit to bully Gerda into being chief? Time had eaten the particulars. She’d held Gunnvor’s babe in her arms as the girl cried and Aghit’s master stitched Gunnvor together again. Hush, she’d told the babe. Hush. Gerda had never liked to listen to Aghit.

Aghit mirrored Gerda, her arms folded, and pressed as close as the table allowed, so that she might speak lowly with some presumption of privacy. 

“The other clans follow Roald. If Hemming supports you, they won’t fight you.”

The chief ran a thumb over her elbow. She looked at the table and not Aghit. The thick line of Gerda’s eyebrow had arched.

“Arrson fought.”

“With the expectation of killing you,” said Aghit. “The rest of the cowards—”

“Clan heads, I thought,” murmured Gerda.

Aghit unfolded her arm and, in the guise of resting her hand upon the chief’s arm, flicked Gerda with her nail. Gerda hid a smile, tucking her chin.

“They went to the walls. Cowering.”

“Like cowards do.”

“Hush,” said Aghit, and Gerda nodded. Aghit eyed her narrowly then, when she was certain of the chief’s obeisance and her sincerity in this, she continued. “Hemming defended you against Arrson’s men. That was as good as declaring the Roald clan’s allegiance before the council. Better. Arrson might very well have succeeded if it weren’t for Hemming and his kin.”

Gerda disagreed, but she did not say why, only shook her head slightly. Again Aghit flicked Gerda’s arm.

“If you want the rest of the clans to listen to you, listen to Roald. He wants to support you.”

“That isn’t what he wants,” said Gerda quietly.

The doors to the great hall opened. An influx of more soldiers, come to eat in the warmth and company offered by the common kitchen, brought with them a gust of snow and chill wind, laughter, and fresh witnesses to an already crowded hall.

Gerda lifted off her arms. She stood, throwing her legs over the bench one at a time. For a change she’d come to attention, her full height realized. Looking absently to the doors, Gerda rapped her knuckles against the table. As absently, she glanced over Aghit.

“Would you like some wine?”

Not particularly, no: Aghit preferred the honeyed mead more readily available. Aghit rose, smoothing her skirts.

“Thank you, my chief,” she said with her eyes respectfully cast. “Wine would ease my head.”

Gerda inclined her own sorry head in recognition of the shit. Her eye had creased. She was merry somewhere in there; mead in her mug, and that likely not the first draught she’d drowned.

“Your head could use less easing,” Aghit muttered as they left the great hall.

Gerda laughed: silently, the whistle in her nose the sole giveaway. “I haven’t had that much.” She brushed her temple.

“But it does hurt you.”

Ruefully Gerda pulled her mouth to one side; right, and she corrected it after a little flinch. “Sometimes. Yes.”

“The chief would not withhold important information from her healer,” Aghit warned.

“I did tell you.” 

“Only now.”

“That’s still telling you.” Gerda touched her temple again, very carefully. “And it only hurts some. Never for long.”

Aghit was back to studying her chief as the snow pasted their faces. The chief had stuck her lip out. Her eye had crossed, trying to look up at her head.

“Put that back,” said Aghit, unmoved. “And if your head does hurt, it’s your own doing for not seeing me like you’re supposed to. And going outside! You promised you wouldn’t.”

“I’m sorry, Aghit,” said Gerda.

Aghit eyed the chief again. Chief, yes, but still the girl she’d lectured for climbing trees and getting stuck with her skirts tangled in the branches. Oswald had thought it unbecoming to let his daughter wear trousers but he’d changed his mind after that. Aghit had lectured him, too. 

Trails of light gleamed, making weird shapes of the falling snow, which, so lit, cast small and fleeting shadows in the air. Along each path, every twenty feet a wicker basket sat on a pole; in every wicker basket shone a load of electrosquirms, the miniscule dragons distant cousin to the more hostile fireworm. The ‘squirm diggers would keep the baskets lit through winter. When a batch of ‘squirms had burnt out, usually after nine or ten days, the dragons—buttery for all you could eat one in a bite—would be traded to the common kitchen and a fresh nest dumped into the basket. A basket halfway along the hill path had gone dark. Aghit and Gerda passed it, walking through the stretch of darkness it left.

A shadow moved up the path toward Aghit and Gerda. As someone would come to tend to the basket, Aghit presumed this was the man. Not until he hailed them did she realize it was Hemming. Gerda slowed and took a step closer to Aghit. The storm may have disguised the movement. It needn’t: the chief could fall back as far as she liked and hunch over, too, but as Aghit was a full third shorter than Gerda, the chief could hardly hide behind her. At the tender age of thirteen, Gerda had out-grown Aghit.

If he did mark Gerda’s sudden reticence, Hemming was too smooth a politician to allow them to notice his noticing.

“Hello, hello,” he said again, making it four times he’d greeted them. He smiled handsomely up at Gerda and spoke clearly despite the wind. “Well met, chief. Though the night is unwell.”

Gerda said nothing. Aghit lifted her heel and set it on Gerda’s toe. The chief stiffened.

“Yes,” said Gerda.

Hemming continued to smile. He was tall, though not so tall as Gerda, and made on powerful lines, though not so powerful. At twenty-eight, he’d age over Gerda. Experience, too: he’d inherited leadership of the Roald clan at his father’s death and he’d held on to it. In a concession to the weather he’d traded his customary mail for tailored furs and a fine coat cut to frame his shoulders. That smile of his was far from the only handsome thing about him. 

“I meant to speak with you,” said Hemming. His speech was impeccable, though he spoke slowly enough Aghit thought perhaps he’d a mug or two of mead warming his belly as well. 

A long nothing stretched. Aghit weighed stepping on Gerda’s foot again. She’d rather not; ideally the chief had presence of mind enough to recognize Hemming’s invitation. Then the chief said, “Oh?”

“Some matters of state,” he said. “Not so important they can’t wait till the morrow. I’m sure you’re tired, after visiting your father.”

Though a near thing, Aghit managed not to wince. Oswald shared a mausoleum with all the Berserker chiefs, a stone crypt on the far outskirts of the main village. To journey from this tomb to the great hall on a clear day would take a half hour’s walk. On a clouded, storming night, it would take the better part of an hour and half more besides.

“No,” said Gerda.

Politely he inquired, “Not tomorrow? Then the day after that. If it suits the chief.”

Gerda shifted. The snow crushed crisply beneath her boot. Aghit glanced to the chief and found her looking fixedly at the next lit basket in the line, a warmly glowing spot in the darkness, that haloed Hemming so he was as gilded. Like all unmarried men of Witsless he was clean-shaven. His jaw was illuminated. The smile deepened. With it deepened a sudden unpleasant suspicion in Aghit, that he had noticed Gerda’s falling back and that he found it amusing.

“Tomorrow’s fine.”

“Are you certain?”

The chief straightened. Her gaze remained over his shoulder. “Yes.”

“Then the morning. You mustn’t forget,” he chided gently.

Respectfully Aghit lowered her eyes as Hemming swept past them. She peeked up through her thin lashes to watch his passing: he lowered his own gaze in deference to the chief. The path was not a wide one. His arm brushed against Gerda’s. He was smiling yet with the snow spotting his fine brown hair and the elegant trim of his furred cloak. Gerda did not turn to watch him go, as perhaps—Aghit thought—he would have liked. Rather she glowered at the basket. An odd click sounded: she’d worked her jaw, and the right side popped.

“My bones are near frozen,” Aghit said. “I’d like that cup of wine warmed.”

Gerda stirred. “That would be good,” she said.

The chief’s house was well-insulated, made of stones fitted precisely to one another and then sealed together. The hearth fire had settled. As Aghit tended to it, Gerda fetched the pitcher of wine, two wood caps, and a little uncovered pot to warm the wine in by the fire. The wine was the chief’s prerogative. Of the Berserker clans perhaps only the Roalds might afford the fruity drink, imported at cost from the continent and that only rarely. The pitcher Gerda brought forth was the same pitcher of wine Oswald had inherited from his father. 

Leaning back from the fire, Aghit held her hand out for the pot. Gerda demurred. She shook her head very faintly.

“Let me.”

“I won’t have you warming the wine,” Aghit protested. “Give it here.”

“Your bones are frozen,” said Gerda, creasing. She turned her side to Aghit. “You can take the cups.”

Aghit did, slipping them from Gerda’s crooked elbow. “It isn’t right for the chief to serve an old woman. And you’re the one with the hurt head.”

“Only some,” said Gerda. 

She poured the wine—red and bitter-smelling—into the pot and, grasping the pot by its over-arching wire handle, hung it from the hook set over the fire. Her hands hovered a moment on either side of the pot, ready to catch it should it fall. The pot balanced. She withdrew.

“You won’t avoid Hemming in the morning.”

Gerda turned to sit on the hearth next to Aghit. Stiffly she did so, as if her bones hurt her as Aghit’s, chilled by the wind, pained her. It was the blow to the face, Aghit thought. Gerda had parried the first strike with her atgeir, but the man had got in too close for her to the polearm effectively. She’d felled two of the men, cutting them down as the clan heads scattered or stared dumbfounded as Arrson and his men closed upon her; the third had slipped in while she was pulling the sickle end of the atgeir out of the second man’s chest. If Hemming hadn’t hooked his scarf around the man’s throat and hauled him back, the would-be assassin would have brought his edged baton about for another crushing, cleaving blow. That would have killed her. The blow that shattered her cheek, folding the bone inwards, had nearly done it.

“No,” said Gerda. She rubbed at her right eye, the mangled tissue hidden beneath the bandages. The eye itself had smashed in the socket. 

As Aghit had knelt beside Gerda, miraculously still sitting upright in the hall as everyone shouted at everyone else and Hemming commanded them to silence, she had seen the eye was a loss. There was nothing to do for it but to cut it out and clean the hole. A clan council was meant to be without weapons; only the chief bore arms. The Arrsons had snuck in the baton in the clan head’s walking staff and knives hidden on their persons. None of them were at hand. Aghit shouted for a drink; Hemming shouted for someone to fetch it; a tall woman, the firstborn and heir of the Graverot clan, thrust a bowl of beer at Aghit, slopping half the contents on her skirt. 

“Get another drink,” Aghit had said, and the woman had fetched that too, this in a mug.

The woman, Sigrid, said, “Is she—” as Hemming made order out of the chaos.

“Move,” Aghit snapped, and Sigrid had withdrawn.

“Aghit,” Gerda said, with a child’s vexation, “let me up—” The blood darkened her face. 

Forcing the chief down—a worryingly easy task, as Gerda, blinking, collapsed against the wall—Aghit bade her drink from the mug. Gerda swallowed.

“That’s not very strong,” Gerda muttered. “Weren’t we supposed to use the good stuff for the meeting?”

“Well, it’s going to have to do,” Aghit said. She doused her hand in the bowl to clean it and shook the excess from her fingers. “I’m sorry for this. But you have to stay still, Gerda.”

The head injury dazed her. Gerda said, perplexed, “For what?” and Sigrid, obeying Aghit’s look, put her hands on Gerda’s shoulders.

Droplets fell from Aghit’s fingertips. She shook her hand again and then, with her fingers, she’d dug the eye out.

Now, with the fire to warm them, Aghit beckoned Gerda to face her. She unwound the bandages.

“You owe him your life.”

The scar was red, still young, but the tissue mostly healed. With her fingertips at Gerda’s chin, Aghit tipped the chief’s head back and to the side, to study how the skin folded and whether it needed draining. Gerda blinked slowly. The eyebrow over her right eye was split, a long bald patch shining newly. Aghit cupped Gerda’s face. Gerda lowered her chin. She’d broken her arm trying to climb out of that tree as a girl. Torn her skirts and broken her arm, and she’d cried like a demon on Aghit’s shoulder and in Aghit’s ear as Aghit ran her to the house.

“He talks to me as if I’m a half-wit,” Gerda said.

“Perhaps if you said more than three words to him. Or spoke one word with three syllables.”

Gerda pursed her lips. A muscle in each cheek shifted, the musculature at the back of her jaw tightening as she brought her molars together. The sensation was muted against Aghit’s left hand; the scar tissue, thick, ran far enough down her cheek to swaddle that corner of her jaw.

“He saved your life,” Aghit repeated, more plainly. “All the clan heads saw it. You have witnesses from every clan, two at least. With Roald’s support they’ll all be too afraid to follow Arrson.”

“He didn’t swear allegiance,” said Gerda. 

This stopped Aghit short. She thought again to that day in the great hall’s council room. By tradition the order in which the clans swore fealty to a new chief ran from the smallest and least significant of the families to the most powerful, an order meant to prevent clans like Roald from influencing the leadership of the Berserkers any more so than they did by existing. As a smaller clan, in comparison to clans like Roald or Graverot, the Arrson’s head had gone before Hemming. He’d stood and announced that his loyalties were to the true chief of the tribe, Dagur in exile, and signaled his men.

“Sigrid saw me a week after,” Gerda said, referring to the Graverot clan’s firstborn and to her own convalescence. “She swore her family’s oaths.”

Aghit recalled the visit. Sigrid was poorly named, an ugly girl, but charming and renowned for her honesty; qualities celebrated in the Graverot clan. They had been friends in their youth, Gerda and Sigrid, one of the few friends Dagur had allowed Gerda. Sigrid’s marriage some five years ago had brought distance to them. Though sick with fever Gerda had directed Aghit to permit Sigrid in, and Aghit had left them in privacy to work on her knitting. 

“Hemming saw you too,” Aghit said, but she had stayed in the room for his visit and knew he had commented on Gerda’s handsomeness, the weather, the order of the village, and what the Arrson heir had said or not said in his captivity. At the time Aghit had thought it promising that the Roald’s head had gone to such lengths to preserve and enforce the peace on Witsless while the chief mended. Now she saw it as Gerda must have seen it: as evidence that she was not needed as chief. Aghit thought of Hemming’s beautiful smile, his angled cheeks limned as the snow fell. He’d made no oaths.

“He would not suborn you,” Aghit said, still thinking.

“No,” said Gerda. “Just marry me.”

Aghit flushed. Gerda’s smile flashed, swiftly gone.

“His clan would only strengthen your position.”

“My position,” Gerda said, “would strengthen _his_ position. I’ve had a lot of time to think about it, Aghit. You wouldn’t let me do anything else but think for a month.”

“And you still didn’t listen to me,” Aghit snapped, though her ire was mostly at herself for being so obvious in her matchmaking.

Gerda rose, to set her knee on the bricks and lean, unhooking the pot. 

“They don’t want me for chief,” she said. “They want Dagur. Hemming wants him self.”

She dipped a finger into the pot, testing the wine. Aghit handed her the cups. Gerda poured the wine out carefully. A few drops still splashed on the bricks. She set the emptied pot aside to cool and sat again next to Aghit, who laid her hand on Gerda’s arm.

“You are chief,” said Aghit. “ _You_ are chief. Hemming could not become chief without a majority vote.”

“He’s Roald,” said Gerda. She sipped her wine. “They’re most powerful.”

All of this she said quite calmly, while Aghit fretted. Aghit drank deeply of her cup to stop her tongue before she leapt into a nervous lecture; the bitterness of the wine choked her. Lowering the cup, she gasped for breath.

“Are you all right?” Gerda leaned in. Her brows pinched upwards over her nose.

“Yes, I’m fine,” Aghit said waspishly, but she did bend over to cough. Fumbling, she put the cup on the hearth. 

“You don’t like wine, do you,” said Gerda.

Aghit shuddered. “I hate it.” Her tongue felt coated, an illusion, she knew, but a strong one. She scraped her tongue between her teeth.

“Then why did you drink it?”

She glared at the girl whose soiled diapers she’d washed daily for years. 

“Because you served it to me, my chief.”

Gerda looked to her own cup, held between her rough hands. Her mouth flattened.

“You _are_ my chief,” said Aghit. “You’re our chief. And you’re the only one we have, too.”

“A deficit of options,” murmured Gerda to her cup.

“If they haven’t sworn their oaths to you, make them swear them.” Aghit clutched Gerda’s shoulder. “Listen to me. Gerda. My chief. You must command them. If that means you have to use Roald’s power then use it. It’s good as chief to know your people, but you must use the clans too.”

Gerda looked Aghit squarely on. The violence of her scar made her seem harsher than she was; when she spoke, her voice was of one lost.

“And how do I do that?”

Aghit had nothing. Then she said, “Unify them. Your grandfather did it.”

“My grandfather started a war.” It had turned the clans from fighting each other to fighting a single foe, the expanding Berk, which had claimed neutral islands as sisters and drawn ever nearer to Witsless. 

“The point is that he gave the clans a reason to band together,” Aghit said, flicking her hand and dismissing years of bloodshed. “He showed them it was better to follow him than to kill each other. You need to show them the same holds true for you.”

Gerda nursed her cup of wine. In profile, the left side of her face presented to Aghit, she was handsome, handsomer to a mother’s judgment than Hemming, though Gerda’s mother could not say.

“And you will do it,” said Aghit kindly, “because you must. Now let me see your head. Tell me if it hurts badly when I touch you. And don’t lie to me—I’ll know if you do.”

*

The fever broke. As it left the heights to which it had aspired, it took with it the strangest of the dreams. He forgot most of the details; only weird impressions remained, like of a tall woman bent beside the bed to watch him sleep. His mother, he thought she was meant to be: her face was empty. In the dream she had stared at him with dark eyes and she’d sang a lullaby, the lullaby Ruffnut’s mother had sung to the twins, violent and cruel. Tiny, wingless dragons fell out of her mouth and landed wetly on Hiccup’s cheeks. If Hiccup didn’t eat them, Stoick would see, and his father, who hated dragons, would send his mother away. 

There’d been more to the dream but he’d lost the rest. He would have happily lost all of it. Gothi was said to interpret dreams to find hints of the future in them. He’d no desire to ask her help. The faceless woman with dark eyes lingered.

“Honestly,” Hiccup told Toothless, “I preferred the ones where you were talking. You said some really rude things.” He wagged his finger at Toothless to scold, and Toothless licked his hand then his face. “Oh, Toothless—quit it! Come on! I’m sick!”

Stoick chuckled and stood from his chair by the fire. He nursed the small of his back as he rose. “Leave him, Toothless. Let the lad space to breathe.”

Reluctantly Toothless obeyed. Butting his head to Hiccup’s chest, he nuzzled at Hiccup and whuffed damply across his face and licked him again, a long stroke from chin to brow that left Hiccup sputtering. Then Toothless hopped from the bed and set off around the common room, his wings loosely furled; he bounded up the walls and then spun around the floor. 

Hiccup wiped at his cheeks. Strings of saliva sloped from his arms to his face. 

“How long’s he been inside?”

“He goes out to make waste,” said Stoick, “but it’s been five days now.” 

He thought as he sat on the bed. Hiccup shifted his legs out of the way. A dull clawing sensation pricked at his stump. He was more careful with that leg.

“Aye,” said Stoick, nodding. “Near six.” Winter blizzards made a muddle of time.

Toothless yodeled and jumped for the rafters. His front paws hooked about one and he scrabbled onto it, vanishing in his blackness into the thick shadows there. His tail alone hung between the rafters, and as he skittered from one beam to another, his tail bobbed, withdrawn and then dropping again. He popped his head around to yowl at Hiccup.

Stoick passed Hiccup a thick cloth. It was a tunic, he realized after scrubbing as much of the slime from his face as he could manage. 

“Well, I’m not wearing that one ever again,” Hiccup muttered. He pitched the tunic toward the fire.

“Here,” said Stoick, “eat. You should get something inside you.”

Hiccup accepted the bowl from his father. The smell of it was thick, warm and creamy, with something faintly sharp beneath that.

“You didn’t put any medicine in it, did you?” 

“Gothi’s orders.”

Hiccup stuck his tongue out at the soup. Stoick flicked Hiccup’s nose. 

“Eat, lad.”

“It’s going to make me want to sleep,” he complained.

“Good,” said Stoick, amused in his gruffness. He flicked Hiccup again, admonishing. “Then you won’t be joining the beast in the rafters. I know you, son. You’d be climbing out of bed, ripping out your stitches. Looking for something to do.”

Hiccup sucked on the spoon and considered his father. “So, what—you’re feeding me this stuff so I won’t annoy you?” 

Stoick passed a hand over his beard. He raised his eyebrows. Sighing, Hiccup ate another spoonful. The aftertaste was the worst of it, the tonic giving the meaty soup an acidic edge at odds with the smoother texture and the robust flavor. He’d ate fish raw once to appease Toothless, but the memory was indistinct enough, the moment far behind him, that this, he thought, was surely the foulest thing he’d ever put in his mouth.

“If it keeps you in bed and out of trouble while your leg’s healing…” 

Stoick thumped Hiccup’s shoulder with an open hand. Jolted, Hiccup half-choked on the spoon in his mouth. As he bent forward, coughing with his fingers before his mouth so he wouldn’t spray soup across his father’s bed, Stoick clapped him twice on the back. The spoon, pinched between his teeth, clattered. Hiccup quickly pulled it out, before he choked on it in truth. 

His father’s beard was close. Anxiously Stoick scowled at Hiccup. “Are you all right then?”

“Oh, sure,” Hiccup said. He swallowed and set the spoon in the bowl. It plopped. “I’m fine. That was great. Really refreshing.” 

He cleared his throat and touched it briefly, his fingertips against the skin. The soreness had lessened but still it remained. His thumb ran over the knob of his throat, then lower. That was where Dagur had dug his thumbs in. Hiccup lowered his hand.

“Thanks, Dad.”

Stoick, too, cleared his throat. He rested his hand over Hiccup’s knee, a lump sticking up under the furs. Once, twice, he patted Hiccup there, and then he grasped the knee and squeezed it. The warmth of his hand, that was distant. The weight, however, Hiccup felt, and that started a different sort of warmth in his chest.

“Well,” said Stoick. He cleared his throat a second time and rubbed at his nose. He shook Hiccup’s knee, squeezing again. “Well. The fever’s passed. That’s good. That’s—aye, that’s good. What?” he asked, as Hiccup grinned at him.

“Nothing,” Hiccup said. “Just glad you’re your usual articulate self.” He meant it.

Stoick snorted and cuffed Hiccup’s knee, batting his leg over. Hiccup turned with the blow, on to his side, and his grin, too, turned, from a smile to a laugh. 

“You’re hale enough, then,” said Stoick, “because you’re making poor jokes again, when you shouldn’t.”

“I wasn’t joking,” Hiccup protested. “I was paying you a compliment. Why can’t you just accept a nice word? Why does it have to be a joke?”

“You’ve spent too much time with Gobber.” Stoick shook his head. His mouth had twisted. “He’s got too strong of an influence on you.”

“And whose fault is that? It was your idea,” Hiccup said, shaking the spoon at his father. “I didn’t want to go to work at the forge. But you said I was old enough to be apprenticed—when I was _eight_ , by the way, which is, that is, that’s very irresponsible, apprenticing an eight year old to a blacksmith—”

“Eight is old enough,” said Stoick, as certain in this as he was in all things. Never, Hiccup thought, had Stoick questioned any of his decisions, though perhaps, he recalled, once he might have had reason to do it. “When I was eight—”

“Your dad apprenticed you to Gobber,” Hiccup filled in.

Stoick glowered at him. “My father—the chief—apprenticed me to the master of arms.”

Hiccup reviewed what he knew of Berk’s history; not so much as Fishlegs knew, but enough. “Wasn’t Grandpa the master of arms?”

Above his beard, Stoick colored red, a shade not so striking as that of his beard. “Regardless. I was apprenticed.” He slapped the bed. “And none of that is important to the subject at hand, which is that Gobber’s had too much influence on you. Making jokes. Your poor timing with ‘em. Questioning things. Questioning me.” 

“Well,” Hiccup said, frowning at the soup, “that settles it, I guess. I’ll just have to open up my own forge.”

Stoick laughed, and Hiccup smiled. He’d thought his father would laugh. For so long a gulf had sat between them, a divide like that separating any of the sister islands from Berk, a distance that could not be bridged. The day that Stoick had escorted Hiccup to the forge and announced to Gobber that he was to take Hiccup as an apprentice, Hiccup had understood why. 

Still laughing, Stoick pinched at his nose. He swiped his eyes and then breathing briskly—sucking the air in his nose and expelling it from his mouth—he turned his grin on Hiccup. However great the room, Stoick was always too great for it. Like one of the old gods of legend, too big to be just a man and too powerful a personality.

“You’d give old Gobber some stiff competition. He needs it.”

Hiccup tapped his finger against the bowl. “It just doesn’t seem right. Not to me anyway. Running Gobber out of business, after everything he’s taught me.”

“Run him out of business, would you?” asked Stoick, his brow high.

“I wouldn’t feel _good_ about it.”

“And how long would it take you, then,” said Stoick, “to run Gobber out of business? He’s established.” He jabbed the air with his finger, as though to underscore his words. “He has a reputation with the people.”

“I have one too,” Hiccup said. “And it’s even mostly good now. So—a week?”

“That you do, lad,” said Stoick. 

The moment’s joviality had passed. Once again he was Hiccup’s father. Stoick gestured to the bowl and made a tipping motion, and Hiccup—pulling his face—resumed eating. 

“Leave the smithy to Gobber,” Stoick said. He stood, and the bed frame creaked as his weight left off it. “You’ll have work enough to do when you’re chief.”

Hiccup sat, the spoon in his mouth and his hand on the bar, and watched his father as Stoick drew the furs and thick blankets evenly across the bed, piling them up again where Hiccup had kicked them away or Toothless worried at them so they fell half-off the bed. For the last however many nights, and though they’d discussed the number of days, Hiccup, increasingly drowsy as the soup worked on him, had forgotten, he’d slept in the chief’s bed and the chief had slept on a makeshift cot on the floor, on the far side of the fire. No surprise, then, that his back should ache.

“That won’t be for years,” Hiccup said. “Right?”

Stoick tucked the furs under Hiccup’s right leg. “You can never tell what may happen. It’s always best to be prepared. Hel takes men when she wants them, not when they want for her companionship. Though I’ve always hoped for valkyries.” 

He spoke of it lightly. Most of Stoick’s generation did. Hiccup knew it as he knew everything he did of his father’s father, that his grandfather had died when Stoick was fourteen, that Stoick had inherited the chiefdom from his older brother, who’d died at sea when Stoick was seventeen. The custom was that of death. For a new chief to be announced the old chief usually died. Law permitted retirement, though if any chief in recent record had retired, that was something Fishlegs rather than Hiccup would know. Dagur hadn’t cared to wait to see how Oswald would pass it on, or pass on.

The thought wasn’t one Hiccup had considered before. It moved strangely through him. His head felt heavy, and his eyes too dry; a circumstance of too much sleep, too strong a fever, too many bowls of medicated soup. At the time that Stoick had told Hiccup he would make an excellent chief, perhaps even one of the greats, in the aftermath of that seemingly final confrontation with Dagur, and with Alvin, Hiccup had known only what it was like to have his father’s full blessing. Now he thought: what would it cost to make Hiccup chief?

Hiccup said, “Dad—”

But Stoick had turned from him. “Devil! Out of there!” 

Sharpshot, halfway up the rack and straining to reach the soup pot, overbalanced into the fire. Squeaking, he darted out. He was smoldering. Stoick charged at the Terror. Sharpshot declined the invitation. Trailing smoke, Sharpshot raced about the room, chatting loudly over his shoulder at Stoick.

“Dad,” Hiccup said again, now in exasperation. The chief’s chasing Sharpshot had turned it into a game. “He’s not going to… Dad, you can’t just yell at him; he thinks you’re playing.”

A thump distracted Hiccup. Toothless slipped from the rafters. Quietly he landed on his feet, half upon the bed and half off. His long tail curled. He chirruped at Hiccup and then tilted his head, waiting for an answer. Behind Toothless, Stoick gave up the chase. Poised at the foot of the stairs, Sharpshot deflated.

The soup smell drew Toothless nearer. He repeated his question.

Tipping the bowl to Toothless, Hiccup offered it. “You sure you don’t want any? Buddy?”

Toothless wrinkled his nose and drew his head back at an angle, eyeing Hiccup. He snorted the once. That was it.

“Every drop, Hiccup,” Stoick said. Huffing, he dropped onto his chair by the fire. He gave Hiccup the warning look that had used to seize Hiccup’s chest up with terror. “There’ll be no feeding your leftovers to the dragons.”

“I’ve never done that,” Hiccup protested. “Feed my leftovers? What? I always eat everything on my plate.” 

Everything he cared for, anyway. Hiccup had thought he’d hid it from Stoick well, tossing the bits he didn’t like or hadn’t the interest in eating under the table. He had a habit of forgetting to want to eat, particularly when an idea had rooted in his head, and if he did eat it was porridge or dried apples, something he could make with little effort or time and eat while working. Astrid always noticed. When he’d an idea of improvements for the academy, Astrid would bully him into taking breaks to eat.

“I’m not hungry,” he’d argue, and Astrid would say, “I don’t care,” and then she’d stand over him and watch as he choked down the oatmeal she’d thrown together with too much salt or a splash of beer, for some flavor she clearly hadn’t properly conceptualized.

To Stoick, Hiccup said, “How else could I have grown so—muscular?” The question changed, so that it was the ‘muscular’ in doubt and not the accusation Stoick had leveled at Hiccup.

“Eat it all,” Stoick said, “or I’ll see to it that we dine on eel for a month.” There’d be no sneaking that to Sharpshot or to Toothless. 

Toothless’ nose had smoothed. His eyes lidded. He stuck his tongue out and flicked it, then smacked his jaws quickly thrice: eat-eat-eat.

“You’re enjoying this,” Hiccup told Toothless. 

Ever sympathetic, Toothless made that awful retching sound, the reverberating hua he only ever seemed to make at Hiccup’s expense. 

“Well, you can’t have any now,” Hiccup said. “You had your chance. But you lost it. So ha-ha-ha at you.”

No, said Toothless, that was all on Hiccup: he stuck his head up and _hua-hua-hua_ ed, entirely unashamed.

Forgoing the spoon, he brought the bowl up and gulped the rest of the soup as quickly as he could. Perhaps a few drops remained. Still, Stoick was satisfied. 

Before dropping off again, Hiccup said sleepily, “I could use my own bed. You don’t have to sleep on the floor.”

“I’ve slept worse places,” said Stoick, and he ran his hand down over Hiccup’s eyes, bidding him close them.

He was ready the next day to put on trousers, less because he’d visitors and more out of simple pride. Stoick had gone out to check the guide lines and fetch more fire wood from the stores in the shed.

“Not that I’m expecting visitors,” Hiccup said to Toothless, who watched with interest as Hiccup sorted through the piles of clothes Stoick had left on the bed-side table for him. “Snotlout’s really the only person, uh…” He rubbed two fingers along his brow and decided in the end on kindness. “Bold enough to go out in a blizzard. Maybe the twins, if someone dared them. And none of them would come to see me.”

Toothless looked knowingly at Hiccup. He wittered another suggestion. Hiccup set the tunics aside and glared at Toothless. Blinking his third lids, Toothless took a stab at innocence.

“Arch is not a good look for you, buddy,” Hiccup said. “I really hate to say it. But it’s not.”

The flaps framing Toothless’ cheeks curled out and he hooted at Hiccup.

“No,” Hiccup said indignantly, “you’re not—what points? Points for what? Because you made a remark—that was, frankly, uncalled for, and also wrong—”

Toothless snorted and turned his attention to the wall. He could hardly help it if Hiccup chose to cling to ignorance.

“Well, at least I’m not a big jerk,” Hiccup said, “who picks on a sick guy, with one leg, stuck in bed, without any real friends who will stand by him in this trying time…”

Yawning, Toothless unfurled his tongue. Languidly he relished the moment; he dragged it on, long past what Hiccup considered reasonable or even remotely in good taste. At last, Toothless sighed and clicked his jaw shut again. Then he glanced at Hiccup and blinked all his lids. Picking up the pair of trousers on top of that pile, Hiccup pitched it in Toothless’ face. Toothless recoiled and grunting, he shook the trousers from his face.

“Come on,” Hiccup said, smiling, “I need you to help me get to the stairs. Dad grabbed the wrong trousers.”

Clothes meant nothing to a dragon. When Hiccup wore his prosthetic leg, he wore specifically tailored trousers with a short, seamed shut leg fitted to his stump. It provided a buffer between the cuff and his skin, and the cuff had a stronger grip with the cloth than with his skin. For sleeping, or lounging uselessly in bed with his leg out of commission, he preferred the trousers that had not a seamed leg but an open hem that could be buttoned loosely over the stump. This chafed less and allowed his leg to cool in summer or, in winter, when buried under the furs.

He swung his legs over the edge of the bed. The toes of his bare foot curled against the cold floor. The pain in his chest had dulled some over the years since he’d lost the left leg. The phantom pains, a holdover from the mangling injury he’d suffered in the battle with the Red Death, lingered. It was this that annoyed him; that he should feel that hurt while also feeling the present itch of his stump healing from the frostbite. The stitches were dark in his skin. They’d come out soon. Tomorrow, perhaps. If the storm persisted, as it looked to, Hiccup would cut the knots and draw the thread out without Gothi. He brushed his fingers over the new divots in his stump. They might fill in. He figured they would scar. 

Shaking out one of the sets of tailored trousers, he pulled them on. He’d no desire to freeze to death hopping up the stairs on his bare arse. To get them up his thighs he had to fall on his back and arch. Toothless found this troubling and nosed Hiccup. His snout fitted under Hiccup’s left knee. He grumbled. Withdrawing, he looked down at Hiccup and grumbled again. Hiccup knew it to be worry.

Hiccup held on to Toothless’ head and stood. “All right. All right. I’m coming. Hold on.” His knee held. Gripping Toothless with his left arm, wound about Toothless’ nape, he hopped across the common room. Toothless was steady beside him. His tail curved, a guarding half-circle that once nearly tripped Hiccup. They were at the stairs, and so Hiccup turned his stumble into an act of clumsily sitting on the bottom step. 

“Okay,” Hiccup said. He closed his eyes and leaned back against the steps. The edges bit at his spine. His shoulder was stiff, his hip sore. The itching in his leg was like a gnat, flying next to his ear. He fumbled for the stone pendant around his neck; the stone, bounced, had slipped around back. He straightened it, and then he sat upright.

Toothless followed Hiccup as he crawled up the stairs, though Toothless’ bulk made it so that just two steps up, his right side dipped. He fell from the stairs. 

“You okay, buddy?” Hiccup called.

Toothless shook out all his body; embarrassment. Flashing his teeth, Toothless crouched and bounded for the top of the stairs, bypassing the steps and Hiccup entirely. His pleased snuff drifted to Hiccup, just short of the loft. Planting his hands on either side of the L-shaped cubby that surrounded the stairs up top, Hiccup leveraged him self to the second floor. He beckoned to Toothless, and out of the darkness, Toothless came to him. 

The trousers he used for sleeping were jumbled in the drawer. Stoick had grabbed clothes indiscriminately. Muttering, Hiccup sorted out two pairs of the buttoned type and balanced them across his arm. Then, his task done, he paused. His work space was indistinct in the gloom. Disinterested in clothes, Toothless had gone to investigate what it was Hiccup had left out. What had he left out? The design and materials for the tools to lock Toothless’ fin. That had proved a bust. 

Hiccup felt under the drawers, in the narrow crevice there. The walking stick was where he’d left it after the last time he’d come down with flu. Shouldering it, the polished head fitted in his armpit, he walked to the work table. As if caught doing something he wasn’t supposed to, Toothless backed hastily from the over-loaded shelves beside the table. His foot knocked the bookcase. A bowl precariously perched on the top shelf leapt for freedom and cracked in half on Toothless’ head. Toothless reared. The bowl had held chalk powder, useful for drying Hiccup’s hands as he worked or for drawing on dark cloth. 

“Ohhhh, man,” Hiccup said. “Toothless… Now I’m gonna have to clean that.”

Toothless sneezed and sprayed white powder across the floor. Pale flakes spotted the map he’d pinned to the floor, new stars on the star map. Toothless sneezed a second time and pawed at his face, littering chalk as he backed away, trying to somehow slide out from under the powder clinging to his scales.

“Stairs!” Hiccup said. “Stairs! Toothless, that’s—” He started to laugh and had to clutch the walking stick to maintain his footing. 

Reproachfully Toothless puffed a white cloud at Hiccup. Hiccup wafted his hand. 

“Leave it. Don’t worry about it. We’ll deal with it later. Maybe next time you won’t stick your nose where it doesn’t belong. Huh, nosy?”

Snipping at Hiccup, Toothless jumped down stairs. Still laughing, Hiccup grabbed two journals from the shelf—that, too, dusted with a fine layer of chalk—and tucked them in his tunic; then he tucked the ends of his tunic into the pair of trousers he was wearing. The cloth rubbed at his stitches. He wanted, badly, to scratch. Instead he followed Toothless, though Hiccup had to make do with walking down the stairs rather than hopping over them. Alas, for such was the curse of men.

His father hadn’t returned. Hiccup settled onto the bed and leaned the stick against the table. As Toothless paced about, licking at his palms and then brushing them over his face, Hiccup swapped trousers. 

“You’re just going to make a bigger mess,” he told Toothless. Toothless gave him a withering look: he had already discovered that wetting the chalk made it smear.

Hiccup buttoned the flap over his stump and stretched his leg over the furs. He sighed and stretched his leg again. A brief impression of toes arcing came to him then went away. After consideration, he undid the button.

“Much better,” he said. He looked to the rafters, and from there he looked to the lower ceiling along the back wall, where the loft was set overhead.

Giving up on cleanliness, Toothless called at Hiccup. Hiccup threw a pillow at him. Toothless traced the pillow’s progress, from the bed to a foot from the bed and far short of Toothless. He stared longly at it. Then he looked at Hiccup and snorted.

“Well, who cares what you think?” Hiccup said, and he fell back with his arms crossing over his chest. 

It was true, he allowed. He did want to see Astrid walk through the door. It was absurd; it was childish. Nevertheless this was true. He wanted that. He wanted to hear the door open; he wanted to stir in the bed and lift up his head and there see her, the snow in her hair, her lips flushed, her gaze—if only in that moment at the threshold—unguarded. I have crossed white deserts for you, he thought: a line from an old ballad. Astrid was more likely to say, “Good. You’re awake. What a waste it would’ve been walking through all that darn snow just to find you snoring,” and she’d roll her eyes as though rolling them could hide her smile.

She had looked like that, flushed and unguarded, snow melted on her cheeks, on the threshold at the foot of the stairs leading into the hold. Her hand on the door jamb, an axe in the grip of her other hand. Already she had crossed such expanses for him: wintry storms, a black ocean, the long day and long night, to bear him home. Who would ask more of Astrid? 

He watched the unmoving shadows nestled in the rafters, too high up to be bothered by the fire. He thought of other shadows. He thought of the shadow in that hold, and the flickering light from the lamp as it played against the walls. Hiccup was lonely now, confined to this bed in this room of this house, as the storm worked through its motions outside; lonely and restless too. Stoick had fetched a journal for Hiccup, without prompting. It was a kindness, and it signified a thoughtfulness on his father’s part that still sometimes surprised Hiccup; but it was a blank book, and the challenge of coming up with something from scratch to work upon in its pages was too big and too boring a task for Hiccup, stuck in bed.

He thought of all this and he thought, too, of the Pox and how it had listened as Hiccup spoke to it. All he’d given it was speaking. Even mercy came from another. Her hands hadn’t shaken as she strapped the axe onto the back of Toothless’ saddle. Her breath was as even. He had seen Astrid’s face as she hefted the axe in the hold. 

What could he have done that he hadn’t? If he had tried to reason with Dagur, he thought; but he had tried. He’d tried. He must have tried to reason with Dagur. 

Toothless had crept over to Hiccup. He nuzzled at Hiccup. The chalk left residue on Hiccup’s hands, his sleeves. 

“I’m glad you’re safe too, buddy,” Hiccup said. 

He cupped Toothless’ jaw, one corner to each hand, and pressed his brow to Toothless’ snout. The hot breath warmed his face. Dagur had tried to take Toothless from him. He had tried, too, to kill Stoick. The light from the lamp had illuminated Dagur, like the fever that burned in his eyes. He’d smiled kindly at Hiccup, as he had smiled when he tried to drown him. Hiccup thought: how hard did you try to reason with him?

His fingers dug. He pressed closer yet to Toothless. Toothless warbled and mirrored Hiccup’s nearness. His wings unfurled; he put his foot on the bed and rose on it.

The door opened. Hiccup looked up. His father had returned with a wheelbarrow stacked high with cut wood. Stoick’s nose was cherry red. It went well with his beard.

“Off the bed,” Stoick grouched. “You’ll break the frame. Go on and get. Get. Do your work outside where it belongs.”

Toothless stepped off the bed. He glanced at the door then back to Hiccup. A snuff. 

“It’s okay. Go,” Hiccup said, flicking his hands toward the door. “I’m not cleaning after you if you make a mess in here. And you don’t have to hover over me. I’m not going anywhere.” He hefted his left leg.

Snorting to say Hiccup had better not go anywhere on that leg, Toothless nodded, and then wanderingly, as though it were his own idea and not something anyone had told him to do, he moseyed into the snow. Towering drifts framed either side of the stoop. Stoick had shoveled away or Toothless melted the snow as it piled directly before the door. 

“It stinks halfway to Asgard where he’s pissing,” Stoick said. “I shouldn’t be surprised if he’s burned a hole in the earth.”

“Thank you for sharing,” Hiccup said. “That’s… That’s really good to know.” His heart wasn’t in it. He rested his back on the head board and studied the stitches in his leg. The flaps of the trouser leg had ridden up as he shifted about. His stump stuck out the end.

Stoick noticed. “What are you doing out of bed? Get under the furs. You’re not to be running around.” He abandoned the barrow of wood to fuss over Hiccup. “As soon as I turn my back… Outside just a moment… And you’re in here, running around, making messes no doubt.”

“When was I running? Who—who’s doing all this running you’re so worried about?” 

Hiccup hauled the furs aside to slip under them before Stoick picked him up like an infant and tucked him in. The normalcy of his father’s scowling soothed, as Hiccup’s attempts at humor had not. The tightness in his chest lingered. It would not ease soon. Worry tended to hold dearly to Hiccup. For a time, at least, he could pretend it didn’t.

His father frowned at him. “That’s your doing, the chalk on the Fury’s head.”

“Entirely Toothless’ fault,” Hiccup said, showing Stoick his hands. “I had nothing to do with that.”

“You always have something to do with it,” said Stoick, near fond for all his gruff. Then he tucked Hiccup in anyway.

*

The conversation with Hemming had proved more than Gerda could have hoped for, when she had anticipated a wasted morning. She’d woken with her head hurting. Nothing out of the ordinary about that; it hurt most of the time. At least the ache was constant enough in its attentions that she’d learned to ignore it. The white flashes were what she found difficult to navigate. They usually came to her towards the end of the day or if it was very bright out. The speech of those around her would take on a humming quality. Pale spots would fleck her vision. She’d ten minutes then to find a darker place to sit or she would have to muddle through the next three hours with witnesses.

There was little chance that she would have a flash during Hemming’s visit, not at the hour he called. The pounding in her head was the god-sent consequence of drinking too much mead and then warmed wine after that. Aghit would say it was only what she deserved. Aghit _had_ said that, in fact. 

“How much are you drinking?” she’d asked Gerda as she got dressed to go back into the cold.

“Not much,” Gerda said. “Only to stop my head hurting.”

Aghit had frowned at her and said, “Drink won’t stop it hurting,” and then told her to put the pitcher away and not to drink any more of the wine. Gerda hadn’t. Aghit had a spot of light in her ear. Gerda had seen her out, put the pitcher away, and then vomited into a chamber pot as her head compressed like a grape under a rock. She’d slept the night stretched out on the chilly floorboards. The days when she could beg off political meetings were behind her. No more the redundant second child, but a chief, and obligated to speak with men like Hemming. Gerda melted a pot of snow in the fire for water to drink.

Hemming didn’t notice her discomfort. Perhaps an hour after she’d woken, as she felt at her bandages, he knocked. She opened the door. He smiled up at her and said how lovely it was to see her looking so lovely on a morning as cold as this. If he minded her casual dress, he did not speak of it. Dagur had liked to dress in armor for all occasions, but their father had worn his usual day’s clothes for such meetings. Hemming wore black furs cut to his frame and boots of dragon hide, the more expensive Gronckle rather than Zippleback.

The boots, he crossed at his ankles as he sat. Gerda sat in the chair opposite him. The table rested between them, but Hemming had taken his seat sideways, so that his legs stuck out. He was forever smiling. She folded her hands together on the table. Already she was regretting putting on a plain tunic and plainer trousers. It was pity that made him smile so. 

“How is your head today?”

“Well enough,” said Gerda.

“I only wish that I’d been faster,” said Hemming. “To think how close we were to losing another chief…” He sucked on his tongue.

She wished he would not do that, or at least not so loudly. Her thumbs pinched. He looked at her with his elegant brows lifting. Gerda was expected to say something. 

“Yes,” she said.

His right eyebrow leveled out, but the left remained arched. More pity for Oswald’s dull daughter. As usual she couldn’t think of anything clever to say. She attempted to recoup.

“But you can see,” she said, “I’m still alive.”

“Fortunate for all the tribe that you are still with us,” he said. He uncrossed his legs to face her fully. “The other clans share in my sentiment. You’re much the talk of town.”

“Oh,” said Gerda. “Is that so.” Clearly he wanted her to ask him to expound upon this. If she threw up on his fine Gronckle hide boots, perhaps he’d stop expecting anything. “What are they saying?”

He chuckled and reached across the table to pat her hand. She saw him move and knew his intention and yet still Gerda thought he would not do it. Like a rabbit, she stared at him. Accustomed to the star-struck attention of young women, Hemming sat back, comfortable in his success. Her hand itched where he’d touched it. 

“They are all wondering for your health,” he said, “and eager to see the chief out and about again. No need to fear. Everyone is most impressed at your courage, going out into the storm to help the dock men. Such fortitude. Thought you mustn’t push yourself too hard. I spoke with Stone. He was very worried for your constitution.”

“He shouldn’t.” Gerda refolded her hands, to cover the hand he’d touched. “I’m fine. As you can see.”

Indulgently Hemming said again, “Yes. Fortunately. But you should remember you’re hurt, and allow yourself time to heal.” It was the same sentiment Aghit had voiced, on many separate occasions, often loudly as though she could force it into Gerda’s head. As Hemming voiced it, quite kindly, Gerda heard her jaw clicking on the right side.

“You needn’t shoulder this burden on your own,” he went on. “As the head of Roald, it is my duty to ensure that the clans are united in their support of you. And they are.”

“They do,” said Gerda, meaning: do they? She said it to her hands as she flexed them. She was thinking of handsome, charming Hemming speaking of the chief to the Berserker clans, of her health, of the need for the tribe to stand together. How lucky for Gerda that such an astute politician meant to usher her tribe for her.

His smile widened. He was very toothy. “I spoke with all the clans, to assure my self of their intentions so that I could truthfully assure you that they are to a man devoted to their chief.”

Gerda glanced up at Hemming. Her hands stilled, her palms pushed out to make one continuous line. The first knuckle in the middle finger of her right hand popped softly. So deferential, Hemming. No one could doubt his devotion to their chief. She disliked his teeth. He looked like a Monstrous Nightmare, perched to devour.

“Your chief, too,” she said. The timidity was genuine. Her knuckles had begun to ache from the pressure. She dared to peek.

Without a moment’s hesitation, Hemming said, “But of course,” with the faint surprise of one astonished to be asked such a thing. He touched his fingers to his breast and made a fist of his hand over his heart. The Roald clan’s sigil, the raven with beak open, was tattooed black on the back of his hand. The uninked eye stared at Gerda. He inclined his head. His black braid was tightly woven; it began at his crown. White lines showed between the hairs: his scalp.

“Of course,” he said again, his mellow voice a murmur. “You are my chief.”

She considered the patches of scalp. Deferential, yes, and so very conscientious, too; she wondered if he knew she could tell he hadn’t washed his hair properly in weeks. It wasn’t just the snow that dotted his shoulders.

As he rose smoothly from his bow, he saw her smile. She caught it and forced her mouth flat. His own expression turned decidedly triumphant, though he was swifter and more practiced at hiding things than Gerda. She’d only habit to protect her, the blankness of feeling she’d learned to weather her brother’s ever-changing tempests.

“And I do serve my chief,” said Hemming, “to protect our tribe.”

“Thank you,” said Gerda. “For your continued protection. What else are they saying?”

He’d left an hour after that. Gerda had much to consider. She was not the politician Oswald had proved; Hemming was more like to her father than she supposed she would ever appear. Dagur hadn’t cared for politics. If someone was of little use to him, he ignored them. He’d a strong enough personality to command others and little enough love not to mind if he had to force them to it.

In the common room after Hemming had gone, Gerda stood and walked the length of the wall. Absently she touched the bandaging over her eye. Aghit had told her not to fuss at it, but the cloth did swelter. She thought she could go without the bandages, but she had seen her face after the blow just the once, reflected in a copper bowl. After Gerda, only Aghit had looked at it. Unlike Gerda, Aghit hadn’t flinched, but then Aghit had surely tended to worse. 

The clans obeyed Roald. He was known to them; his clan was powerful; he offered stability. No one could know more of what the clan heads spoke than Hemming. Aghit had been right about that. He thought Gerda slow and too meek for thought, and perhaps she was or could be. Emboldened by his bowing his head to her, Gerda had pushed on. She was careful then to allow her meekness through, that the truth of it would cover the rest.

“You’re sure there’s no one else,” Gerda had said, as the conversation circled about the attack. “No other conspirators.”

He took it as he would a child’s fearfulness. “They are all dead.”

“Yes,” said Gerda, “they are. Aren’t they?”

“You have no reason to fear them,” Hemming assured her. “The last of the traitors died in his cell.”

The last of the traitors was Tollak, she thought, the heir to Arrson; no longer. His cousin Ylva was Arrson now.

“And there’s no one else,” she said again, pressing.

Hemming stroked the back of his tattooed hand. “There are some who might have benefited from your death. Thank the gods it did not come to pass. But they were not involved. I’m certain.”

“Who?” She leaned forward in earnest. 

He was all at once reluctant to speak. “You must know,” he said, “that there are some in the Graverot clan who would benefit greatly if there were no … direct heir.”

“If I’d died.”

“Yes,” he’d said. “If you had died.”

Alone in her ancestral house, Gerda paced. None of this was the sort of thing she usually contemplated. Dagur was to be chief, not Gerda. He was born to it. Aghit could make sense of this; then Gerda thought that Aghit hadn’t questioned Hemming. 

“Sigrid wouldn’t,” Gerda muttered, but Sigrid couldn’t benefit from Gerda’s death. It was Sigrid’s cousin who was Gerda’s third cousin, some off-shoot from the chief’s line originating with a grand-aunt who had married into Graverot. What was his name? Blast it, she should know. Politics were Dagur’s curse, not hers. Bjorn, she remembered, because it had always seemed odd that someone as short and as scrawny as that cousin should be named bear.

“I wouldn’t think them involved,” Hemming had assured Gerda. He said, “I would have prospered as well,” and of course no guilty man would admit such a thing.

Naturally Hemming was wholly trustworthy. Gerda tugged on the bandage where it ran behind her ear. The edge pinched at her. By the end of the day, her ear would be throbbing and hot to the touch. She suspected she _could_ trust Hemming, if not his intentions. That she was still breathing was evidence he wanted or needed her alive. His aims coincided nicely with what Aghit had considered, marrying Gerda to Hemming. Likely he would forfeit leadership of his clan to a younger sibling and join her clan. He’d marry dull, ugly, too tall Gerda and his children would be chiefs. That was what he thought.

Whether anyone in Graverot had wanted Gerda dead, she couldn’t tell from what Hemming had said. He’d said very little by way of the definite, only suggested, or not suggested, that Graverot might, or might not have, been involved. The Graverot clan was one of the tribe’s largest clans. With their power diminished, perhaps by chief’s decree, Roald’s would expand. 

“I won’t strike without knowing where I’m aiming,” she said to the fire. She’d learned that from Dagur, too, that at times it was better to wait and see than to lash out.

She should have pressed Hemming. She hadn’t known how. If she could only have got some specifics from him, rather than platitudes and vague suspicions. The edge of the bandage frayed where she picked at it along her cheek. That feeling of standing at the edge of a decision had softened; the growing resolve faded. What she was to do, she didn’t know. Dagur was meant to be chief. He had told her this all her life, to remind her. If the clans were to turn on her, or on each other, what power did she have to stop it?

“I am chief,” Gerda said. It meant nothing. The clans would break apart without some greater force to shepherd them, and Roald would be that force. So perhaps it was best then that she should allow Hemming to take power. She hadn’t wanted it; she hadn’t looked for it. What Dagur claimed, Gerda would not challenge.

“If anything should happen to Dagur,” Oswald had told her, “you will be my heir.” 

It was the one time he had acknowledged the possibility that Gerda might be chief. He had done so only because she asked. Oswald’s faith in his son was complete. Every trick Dagur pulled, every deceit, every blow he landed on another: all these things proved his rightness for chief. He was clever; he was powerful; others listened to him and believed in his words. Yes, Dagur would be chief. The clans had feared him and in their fear they were compliant. They would not fear Gerda. 

“You’re so soft,” Dagur had said scornfully to her when she was little. She was crying then because he had hit her for following him. “Weak and stupid and soft and ugly. We should have buried you with Mom.”

She couldn’t force them to heed her. She hadn’t Dagur’s strength of will or his intellect. She _was_ dull, Gerda thought. If she weren’t, she would know what to do, as chiefs were meant to know. The fire was low. The wind crooned outside the house, but the storm was nearly come to its end. Stopping before the fire, Gerda touched her swaddled cheek a final time. The soreness in her skin was faint. She thought a great deal of the chiefdom, and of the clans, and of what she could do and what she could not do, and of the things Hemming had said and not said. He would take the chiefdom if she offered it to him. Gerda had a very bad headache that evening.

The next few days, at least, she’d a respite from the stress of politics: woken by the storm, a Zippleback descended into the village and proceeded to blow a massive hole in the great hall before turning its eye, and its nose, on the smoke houses. 

“You’re not going out there!” Aghit shouted at Gerda’s back.

Gerda hefted her atgeir, the long glaive she favored. She slung it to her shoulder. The high note of the blade cutting through the air was as much a comfort as the remembered weight of the pole as it thunked to place in the crook beside her neck. The wood was bare. She needed to have it re-wrapped in iron.

“You want me to be chief, don’t you? Well,” said Gerda, grinning as she stepped into the windy, clear day, “as chief, I can’t let my people fight a dragon alone.”

Aghit cursed her for a fool, a dimwit, and snow-addled at that. “And you only have one eye! You haven’t fought anything since you’ve had only one eye! Gerda!” She chased her chief down the hill. Gerda’s legs were longer and her stride unencumbered by skirts; she swiftly outstripped Aghit. 

The Zippleback had a soft, buttery leather look, and its twin necks were too long for its plump body. A juvenile, then, perhaps three years old, and all the more dangerous for it. A grown Zippleback could control and aim its gas, but a young one wasted its supplies in vast clouds that engulfed large areas. Fewer shots with a greater yield: in spring, hunters checked the mountains for nests, to kill the hatchling Zipplebacks before they grew large enough to leave the peaks for the sea.

Gerda had heard the first explosion in her bed chamber as she washed her face and Aghit admonished her for neglecting to do so in the evening as well as the morning. She hadn’t told Aghit that her head pained her too much at night. It wasn’t till she was nearly to the great hall, where a small group of villagers had treed the dragon on top of the hall, that she realized she’d forgot to wrap her scar. The cold, biting at her wet skin, reminded her. So too did the man who jumped at the sight of her. 

Her stomach heaved. Aghit punched through the snow; her footsteps neared. She ought to go inside. Someone else turned: Hugdis, the woman from the docks crew. Hugdis stared at Gerda. 

Gerda swallowed. She said, “How many shots left?” Her voice was steady.

“Two,” said Hugdis, still staring at Gerda’s right cheek. “We think. It’s only used one, but it’s young.”

She nodded and considered the smoldering maw newly made in the side of the hall. Then, tipping her head back and shielding her eye, she considered the roof, and the dragon pacing upon it. The wood creaked. The roof wouldn’t hold under that weight, not with the support of the wall so removed.

“Any archers?”

Aghit was almost to them. 

“Burrnose is fetching bows from the armory,” Hugdis said. She had finally noticed she was staring, and now, reddening, she looked at Gerda’s feet.

“My chief,” Aghit said, half out of breath. What breath she did have puffed in the air. “I strongly advise—that you not do—what I strongly suspect—you are thinking of doing.”

“I’m not thinking of anything,” Gerda said.

Hugdis smiled as if she shared a joke with Gerda. Her smile froze when Aghit said sharply, “Oh, stop that right now!” Uncertainly Hugdis looked between the two women.

“Don’t…” Aghit bent over and sucked in a breath. She glared ferociously at Gerda. “Don’t you dare! My chief,” she said with more respect. “We can’t afford… Oh, take that hill.”

“We can’t afford to build a new hall,” Gerda agreed. That wasn’t what Aghit had meant. To the gathered persons, Gerda said, “When Burrnose gets here with the bows, tell him not to shoot.”

A man laughed and then said, “Oh—you aren’t joking?”

“I’m not very good at jokes,” said Gerda. The roof was high enough, and thus far enough away, that she could make the distance readily. Balancing the atgeir in her hand, she turned it over, brought it back, and threw it. The metal end drove into the wood, just short of the roof. She glanced at Hugdis.

“I just don’t want you to shoot me.”

Dear Aghit verged on apoplexy, but she could not contradict Gerda before so many witnesses, not without undermining the very authority she urged Gerda to claim. At last Gerda gave in to temptation: she smiled before these witnesses at Aghit. They all stared then, for the gorge set into her bones distorted her smile. She felt the distortion. What she looked like to them, she didn’t know. A dullard with a monster’s face. 

Aghit alone did not flinch. Closing her eyes, she took another breath, this time to quell. The color receded. Her eyes opened.

“My chief,” she said.

Gerda scaled the side of the hall. Though two stories tall, it gave little challenge. The hole the Zippleback had blown into the wall gave her material to use, though the ash was gritty on her hands and the wood did break. At the roof, she grabbed the pole and swung up, ripping the atgeir free as she did so. She landed heavily in the snow. 

The snow had distracted the dragon, like the snow did a child after a storm passed. The left head rose, bobbing as it studied Gerda. The right head rubbed in the snow, trying to burrow. Gerda gripped the atgeir and walked slowly from the edge. As she climbed, the second head turned to look at her too. The first, left head corkscrewed on its neck, the column twisting into loose spirals as it watched her approach. 

She took care to maintain distance, out of respect for the uneven footing, the limits of her polearm, and the dragon’s reach. The right head had stretched to its full height. It made clicking sounds, and the left head looked to its twin then at Gerda, then Gerda’s iron glaive. The roof groaned as the dragon shifted. Its two tails lashed, upending piles of snow. Someone below shouted as a snow drift collapsed to the ground. 

As Gerda paced about the roof—mindful of the edge as she neared it—the Zippleback shuffled in the opposing direction, as though to follow her in her circuit. Those over-long necks undulated. Its belly dragged through the snow. The one head chattered. The other, slinking lower as its twin swayed higher, hissed. The wind carried a sweet smell to Gerda, a smell that stuck in the nose. She wrinkled her mouth.

On the ground, at Gerda’s back, Hugdis shouted, “The gas, my chief!”

The warning was unnecessary. A green cloud shuddered out from the right head’s mouth, distended so its teeth stuck out like rocks from a sea fog. Gerda swung her atgeir into position, grasped in both hands. 

Dagur had brought tales of tamed dragons to Witsless from Berk: wild claims that Stoick’s son, Hiccup, had befriended a Night Fury and that the Hooligans possessed an army of dragons, with which they would conquer all the islands of the archipelago barbaric. Hiccup, Gerda vaguely recalled as frail and sullen. The prospect of him mastering dragons was as laughable as that of Gerda as chief. Now that she was chief, she was no closer to believing Hiccup a dragon tamer. A dragon could not be tamed.

The heads leered at her. Then the gas, thick and too sweet and pulled to her by the wind, hid everything from her. In the gloom, Gerda followed the footprints she’d made in the snow. Quickly, hunching as low as her height permitted, she darted through the cloud to cleaner air, where the gas was thinner. The fresher the air, the closer she drew to the dragon. 

The strategy was an old one learned early, and it worked best against young Zipplebacks, who liked to play with their prey. Hideous Zipplebacks were common to Witsless, a plight the Berserkers had struggled against for decades. In the winter they nested; in summer the young migrated to the harbors and the lowlands, where they burned crops, sank ships, devoured flocks and frightened off the fish, and poisoned children and the elderly with their gas. They were beasts like any other, but unlike sheep they could not be penned or herded. If you found a nest of vipers, you killed them.

The gas thickened. Somewhere in that mist, the dragon spoke softly between its self. The cloud and the wind rendered the sound indistinct. Gerda pulled her collar over her mouth and nose and held it there as she waited in a crouch to spot something. A little slick crunch. The tails rustled. Her eye watered. She let go of her collar and wiped at her eye. Her hand stilled at her cheek. There, she thought. A shadow roiled in the gas. The head moved side to side. Left or right? She clutched the atgeir in both hands and braced. Whatever the head: now.

Gerda swung her atgeir through the air. The blade whistled and then the heavy iron head thumped into the snow, far from her. The shadow turned; the dragon’s attention had focused on the noise. She dragged the atgeir—her hands clenched around the end of the pole—through the snow, so that the Zippleback’s focus remained there. She hocked the powder up, a white clump of ice that spattered on the one head, and in the same motion shifted her hand higher on the pole and turned the swing into a battering blow, delivered to the right head as it crooned at the left. The dragon recoiled, its heads parting.

She didn’t need to worry about depth perception or subtlety; even a juvenile, the Zippleback was monstrously large. She could not miss. Gerda bounced the atgeir off her palms, caught the pole in her hands in the proper position, and—as she took a single, lunging step forward—she drove the blade into the fleshy junction at the base of the two necks, that meaty spot half a hand-span wide situated between the two clavicles. The iron head of her glaive was three feet long with a curved leading edge. She pushed the pole downwards as she shoved the blade in, so that the edge hooked. 

The dragon began to scream. One head shrieked highly. The other, the left head, howled. Her head rang with it. The inside of her right ear hummed. Sliding forward, Gerda shoved her boot against the dragon’s breast and hauled her blade free again. She’d experience with the twist. Blood burst hotly across her face. The Zippleback’s right head reared. Its mouth opened. The spark would light up the roof. The hall would blow. Gerda shoved off the breast and swung again.

Aghit was yelling at Burrnose not to shoot. The world shimmered. The right head gagged. Bloodied spittle welled around its teeth. It made a small moan, wet: too wet to spark. She spun the atgeir around her shoulders and with the second blow cut through the neck. The blood melted the snow. The head fell heavily. So did the guttering throat. 

The Zippleback spat gas at her, its remaining head snarling. It lashed about, moving erratically; the loss of one head left it unbalanced. No fear that it would ignite the gas, but so long as dragon had teeth it held power. For a strange second, as she turned her head to follow its movements, she saw double. Her vision refined. A clarity of depth returned to her. As the Zippleback steadied and prepared to strike, Gerda struck first. The blade sank deeply. She took that head too. The body stumbled: to its knees, to the roof, on its side. Long, dark runnels carved the snow. 

Gerda ground the butt of the atgeir to the roof. She closed her eyes; she wavered. The pounding in her head strengthened. Gerda rested her forehead on the flat of the blade and gripped her weapon’s pole for strength. The sweet stink lingered, too powerful even for the smell of blood to mask it. Her stomach heaved, not on account of the dead beast, but on account of how the gas burned at the insides of her head. The humming in her ear had turned to a flat ringing. The white headache was very close. 

“My chief!” Aghit said loudly. “My chief! Are you all right? Take your hand off me, Burrnose—I helped your mother birth you.”

“Ma’am—”

“Gerda!” Aghit shouted.

She swallowed, clearing her throat. Holding tightly to her atgeir, she lifted her head again to call out: “I’m all right, Aghit.”

“Then get down here before that dragon’s farting knocks you out!”

Someone laughed: Hugdis, from the sound of it. She had a very warm laugh. Gerda freed the atgeir and then paused. She considered the dragon’s corpse, steaming in the reddening snow. 

“Hold on,” Gerda called. “Tell everyone to step back, please. I’m going to push it over.”

“Not on your own, you’re not,” Aghit replied swiftly.

She sent two persons to help Gerda drag the dead weight to the edge of the roof, Hugdis and a nervous, young fellow even worse than Hugdis when it came to gawking at Gerda’s face. As they rolled the massive body—more massive, it seemed, in death than when it had lived—over, Gerda fixed her gaze on the dragon’s thick skin, slowly sliding up under her hands as they pushed. The body when it fell thumped terrifically. A cloud of white powder burst into the air, ice with it. 

“Whew,” said Hugdis. She smiled at Gerda, but when Gerda smiled back, Hugdis’ mouth tightened; only just, and at the corners. Gerda looked at her feet.

The heads were easier to toss over. Gerda could have done those on her own. She left them to Hugdis and the fish-mouthed boy.

Her journey downwards was less elegant than her ascent. The footholds she’d used on her way to the roof were difficult to find when she looked down rather than up. She jumped the last ten feet and landed in a crouch. Her knee gave; she fell back against the wall, which prevented her from making a total fool of herself before the crowd. There _was_ a crowd, though not a large one, and they were all surrounding either Gerda or the dragon. A short man, without any markings of rank, helped Gerda stand. He clapped her arm.

“That was very well done!” he said.

“Aye,” said a dowdy woman, her dour face creased into a smile, “very well done, chief. Very well done!” 

It was a cheer the rest of the crowd picked up. Suddenly there was a crush about Gerda, of persons wanting to congratulate her for slaying the Zippleback and saving the hall and doing so bravely, on her own. They were sailors, or they were soldiers, or they were the lay workers who changed jobs daily to meet the village’s needs: the sort of people who depended on the hall’s kitchen for regular meals rather than their homes or their clans. Someone grabbed her hand to shake it. Someone else thumped her shoulder. Another person asked if she meant to keep the dragon or to share it.

Owlishly Gerda blinked. Her neck felt hot, her head swollen. Jostling with his neighbors, a man elbowed her, and she jumped.

“Er, share it,” she said, then some semblance of etiquette reemerged from its ancient hiding place in a cobwebbed corner of her skull: “I give my kill to the people of Witsless,” which was to say it was for the hall. 

The cheer that went up at that was near deafening. Gerda cast about for Aghit. Instead she saw Hugdis, stepping off the wall into the snow and smiling tentatively again at Gerda. Her hesitation at Gerda’s deformity had nearly gone. Gerda’s throat hurt.

Aghit shoved through the crowd. Shorter than most grown Berserkers, she’d been too small behind all those shoulders for Gerda to spot her. Then she was before Gerda: Aghit with her grey-streaked hair and the fine wrinkles surrounding her eyes.

“My chief,” she said. She saw the blood on Gerda’s face. She saw the scar, too. Relief warmed Aghit. Rather than immediately scold, she smiled with her lips together and her eyes soft. 

“My chief,” Aghit said again.

Gerda tucked her chin and peeked. “Hello, Aghit. I killed the dragon.”

“And after I told you not to do it.” Aghit tutted. “How very like you. Well, that’s the chief’s right, to ignore their healer’s counsel. Let me see your head.”

“None of it’s mine.” Gerda bent to let Aghit check.

Aghit’s fingers were gentle. She’d been gentle like that even as she set the bones in Gerda’s face as best she could and then stitched up the flesh. Gentle, too, when Gerda had fallen out of that tree long ago and cracked her leg. 

Very quietly Gerda said, “You were right. My head does hurt.”

As softly, that no one else might hear, Aghit said, “Then let’s get you fixed up, my chief.”

Gerda nodded and stood tall, her chin up. The lines about Aghit’s eyes deepened and then she understood. What it was in how she looked at Gerda then, Gerda could not at first name. Bearing her atgeir still, the polished haft smooth with blood and the blade upright, Gerda walked on with Aghit behind and beside her. A silent pulsing had started behind Gerda’s eye. Around the bend in the path, that hid the trail to the chief’s house from the otherwise remarkable vantage point of the hall, Gerda lowered her glaive and clutched at her face. Aghit was there to bid Gerda sling her arm around Aghit’s small shoulders. The remainder of the distance, they walked together like so, Gerda bearing her glaive and Aghit bearing Gerda.

The Zippleback, though young, had meat enough to augment meals at the hall for two weeks. It did; it would. For the first week, it fed the crews on whom the task of repairing the great hall had fallen. Volunteers, all of them, and Gerda was there to oversee it and to help with lifting the new wall. A new wall, and a new roof to fit it: the hours of the day were short, but so too might be the break between storms. They worked into the night, and so did Gerda. The workers liked her. She was careful to bandage her right cheek every morning before she left to help with the rebuilding. 

When her head pained her, as it sometimes did, she gave a sign to Aghit. The healer would swoop in and play at bullying the chief into attending to diplomatic duties. It was a simple ploy. No one questioned it. Aghit was the village’s healer, its sole master healer now, but she had served as the chief’s family’s healer before that. Many of the workers thought it admirable that the young chief showed such respect to an elder like Aghit, though Aghit had no family and no name. 

If any were concerned that Aghit held too much sway, then Burrnose set them at ease: he’d seen Roald calling on the chief recently, and hadn’t Graverot’s heir consulted the chief? When the new head of the Arrson clan traveled from the estate to the village, she would surely call on the chief, too. Everyone knew the Arrson and Roald clans were forever at crossroads, and Graverot was at odds with both.

“A diversity of opinion,” concluded Burrnose. “No one’s commanding all her attention. She’s listening to all of them.”

Others were not so appeased. “You say that like it’s a good thing,” said Gubble, the fish-mouthed boy. “At least with Dagur you knew what to expect. What’s she going to do?”

“I’ve sailed with her,” Hugdis said, “and she’s a fine person to work with.”

“Well, that’s all wonderful for building halls,” Gubble said, “but what about chiefing? The most leaderly thing she’s done so far is tell us to fix the hall when any idiot with half an eye could tell we needed to do that.”

“Careful,” Burrnose warned.

Gubble scowled but made no more comments about eyes.

Again Hugdis said, “A fine person,” and she went back to staring into her drink like she wished it would slap her.

As for Gerda, it was as she left Aghit after another diplomatic meeting (so called) that she finally placed the expression Aghit had worn when she had stepped aside to allow Gerda to walk tall and alone before her people. Not fondness, though fondness was in it, and not regret, though there was some measure of that, but pride. She thought of that as she helped to fit the roof, and she was humming as she thought, not a humming in her ears, but a happy, tuneless song that had the man working opposite her giving her odd looks. Gerda smiled at him. Her scar was covered. He smiled back.

*

Toothless was on Gobber the moment he’d opened the door. “So it’s war again, is it?” Gobber asked. The Night Fury was trying to scale him like a cat would a tree. A very large wing whacked him in the head. The tail nearly took his legs out from under him. Sticking his arms out, Gobber fought his way into the chief’s house. Toothless clawed at him and then bounded into the night through the open door, using Gobber’s shoulders as a springboard. Gobber staggered and stuck his peg leg out as a brake, before he cracked his head open on the floor.

“What are you doing here?” Stoick demanded. 

“I should have thought it obvious,” Gobber said, brushing snow from his knees. “Getting murdered by your son’s pet.” 

“It’s a storm out,” Stoick growled, gesturing to the door and the swirling flurries outside it, “and you’re putting yourself at risk—”

“Oh, come off it.” Gobber set his pack down and kicked the door shut. “It’d serve me right if I couldn’t find my chief’s house after all these years. Froze to death in a drift. Tasty Viking icicle. My dear old ma would kick me up and down Hel’s table, that’s for sure.”

“He’s just tired of being penned up all day,” Hiccup said. 

“What, the dragon or Stoick?”

“Gobber,” said Stoick.

Gobber ignored him. Stoick had that flush that meant he’d been shouting again, and he scowled as Gobber walked past him to kneel beside the bed. 

“So, not dead yet, eh?”

Hiccup snorted. He was sitting on top of the covers in a clean-ish tunic and a pair of the button-leg trousers Gobber had suggested Stoick commission from one of the tailors. His hair was a right mess, though, sticking up in ragged spikes every which way. Someone hadn’t reminded the boy to tend to his hair.

“Does everyone think I’m going to die every time I come down with a cold?”

Gobber rapped his knuckles on the boy’s left knee and stood. “It’s one of the hazards that comes of losing a limb. They all think you’re going to keel over. He’s not trying to help you over to the chamber pot, is he?”

“Well,” said Hiccup, “he took my _leg_ , so,” and he scowled at Stoick, who was him self still scowling, so that Hiccup looked like a very thin shadow of his father.

“You don’t need it,” said Stoick. “You need to stay in bed—”

“The stitches are ready to come out—”

“You’ve no say in that. It’s Gothi who’ll know when it’s best time to cut them—”

“It doesn’t hurt anymore,” Hiccup argued, “and I’ve been putting the salve on it every four hours, like you said to—”

“Keep the weight off it,” Stoick thundered over Hiccup, “that’s what she said. You don’t need to be running about on that leg and making it worse—”

Hiccup threw his hands up. “I’m not running around anywhere! It’s snowing outside, you said so yourself. What, am I going to, to go out into a blizzard?”

“Yes!” said Stoick, but he struggled to find an argument to support it. He settled for shouting, “Because you’re unreasonable!”

“ _I’m_ unreasonable!”

Stoick nodded firmly. “Aye. You’re entirely lacking in reason. If you’d reason, you’d know better than to go sneaking upstairs on your own—”

“I wasn’t alone,” Hiccup said, exasperated. “Toothless was with me. I didn’t need your help, Dad.”

This was all quickly becoming rather personal. Gobber thought it prudent to redirect their energies to something more productive.

“I think you’re both unreasonable,” Gobber said. 

“I’m not unreasonable!” Hiccup said. “I think it’s unreasonable that you’re accusing me of being unreasonable for thinking I might know more about my own leg.”

As his son was explaining how no one understood him or valued his insights, and so on and so on, Stoick said, “And what do you want, Gobber?”

“For the both of you to grow up, for starters,” Gobber suggested. “Why don’t you let me take a gander at that leg? Seeing as I’m the only other person present with any experience.”

Stoick grumbled “och!” and tossed his hands, a flinging gesture as he turned away that said he’d enough of the two of them. Truly it was a treacherous path to walk, being the sole person about with any sense at all. How the chief bore that lonesome burden, Gobber could but wonder. He ignored Stoick.

“Unbutton the leg and let me see.”

“I’m very uncomfortable with this,” Hiccup complained. His “och”s tended to wordier incarnations, but it was an “och” all the same. He undid the button and rolled the cloth to his knee. 

The worst of the bruising had gone from the stump; most of the swelling, too. The skin directly about the stitches was clean-looking if sensitive. Hiccup winced slightly at Gobber’s prodding. He’d have to go without the leg for a while longer, then. The stump was red but the skin only usually warm to the touch. No infection then, or if infection then not one that might threaten the rest of the leg. Gobber scratched his chin and nodded.

“Aye, they’re good to take out.”

“Ha,” said Hiccup, grinning at his father.

“Let me finish!” said Gobber, cutting off Hiccup but Stoick as well. “You need to stay off that stump.”

“Ha!” said Stoick.

“Will _you_ let me finish?” Gobber demanded. To Hiccup he said, “Off the stump, but not off the leg.”

“Ha!” said Hiccup again, and Stoick said, “Gobber!”

“That’s what I’ve brought you,” Gobber told Hiccup. “A project while you’re stuck wasting away in bed from a cold.” 

He fetched his pack and tossed it to the bed. Hiccup scrambled to pull his legs out of the way.

“What is it?”

Gobber tapped Hiccup on the temple. “Use that fat brain of yours to figure it out.”

“Gobber,” said Stoick again, and Gobber went to him. Stoick leaned to him, so their words were theirs alone. “What do you mean by ‘not off the leg’? Gothi said—” 

“I can guess at what she said,” Gobber said with a snort. “But the boy’s got to be as restless as that Night Fury of his.” At Stoick’s glance toward the bed, Gobber pressed. “The more restless he gets the more likely he is to set the house on fire with a bucket of water.”

Still facing the bed, Stoick sized Gobber up from the corner of his eye. “I remember a time when you used to attempt subtlety.”

“You don’t encourage subtlety.”

“I prefer honesty.”

Gobber stepped around so that he stood before Stoick again and the chief’s view of the lad was blocked by his shoulders. 

“All right, then here it is, honest to goodness,” Gobber said. “I’m sure the boy’s already said this to you but you won’t have listened to him because you’re his da and you’re still thinking of him as a boy.”

“Because he is a boy,” Stoick countered.

“No,” said Gobber, shaking a finger, “he’s nearly eighteen. You were chief at his age.”

Stoick set his hands on his hips. His fingers tapped. “It was a different time, Gobber. There were higher expectations of me.”

“You don’t think your expectations are high enough?”

“All I expect him to do,” Stoick said, lifting one hand to clench it, “is to stay in bed. So that he can heal. But you know what he’s like. He’ll be gadding about the village, never mind the storm. Because he got it from you.”

“Me!” Gobber slapped his wood hand to his breast. “You’re trying to put this on me now?”

Stoick turned on his heel, holding his now open hand to the door, his palm presented to the gods for their support. 

“Who else is running around in this weather?”

“That’s beside the point!”

“It’s exactly the point.” Stoick snapped his hand back in a whipping sort of gesture, his first finger stabbing at Gobber to say _got you this time_.

“The point,” said Gobber, pinching his middle two fingers to his thumb as he gave Stoick a _got you too_ , “is that he’s grown, and he’s responsible, and you shouldn’t have taken his leg. No, don’t give me that look, the Gobber’s taking nonsense look—”

“You _are_ talking nonsense,” said Stoick. He was half-laughing, without humor. “So I should give him the leg and let him walk around on it while he’s still healing.” 

He spun again, his arm out, but the boy missed this bit of theatre. Hiccup’s head was bent to the bag as he emptied it. Gobber exhaled softly and then, returning to Stoick, clasped his chief by the arm. He held firmly to Stoick.

“What’s nonsense is taking his leg from him,” Gobber said. He was without humor too, though not, perhaps, without some measure of sympathy. “It’s his leg, Stoick. Maybe it’s not flesh or bone, but it’s his leg all the same.”

Stoick glanced away, to Gobber’s leg. The lines around his nose thickened. 

“Aye,” said Gobber, more lightly, “and if you tried taking my leg from me, even if I was bleeding guts, I’d beat you over the head with it first. Think of it as if Hiccup were you and you were taking your axe away from … you.” Gobber paused and thought this through. “Oh, you know what I mean. You’re taking his strength from him.”

Stoick’s beard pulled. Some trace of a smile deepened his cheek. “Aye,” he said, “I know what you mean, Gobber.”

That was, Gobber knew, as much self-reflection as he could hope for at the moment. With Stoick it often took time for something to sink in, and it was Hiccup who would bear the brunt of the outcome: a clumsy apology, arranged in a bouquet of hemming and hawing and mumbled justifications.

“You’ll just have to trust he’s senses enough not to run out into a blizzard,” Gobber concluded, “though Odin alone knows if he got enough of that from his mother. He didn’t get it from you.”

More than a trace of a smile at that: Stoick looked again to Hiccup as he smiled. “You’re forgetting the time she rescued that Terror with the broken wing.”

He had forgotten. Very long ago, that: the lads, he and Stoick and Spitelout, had been perhaps six or seven and Valka fourteen. She’d snuck it into the Jorgenson house and kept it in her room for a week. Any wild animal with a broken limb was of poor temper and liable to bite the hand tending it. The Terror had got out of her room, bit Spitelout, not his hand but his bum, set fire to the common room, and bit Valka too. In the end Valka’s pa had killed the dragon as an example to her. Spitelout had complained for ages about his sore arse, and Gobber had laughed at him for it. 

Trying to recall Valka at that time, Gobber remembered instead an event of much later years, of the Nightmare’s head Stoick had mounted outside the chief’s house. Valka had only just returned a widow to Berk, she twenty-two, Stoick but freshly fifteen. Swollen with pride, Stoick had boasted of the kill. 

“Oi,” Gobber had muttered, seeing how she’d stilled, “Stoick… Maybe you shouldn’t be bragging of this so much, right now. To her.”

But Stoick, caught up in his success, had ignored Gobber and told Valka precisely what he’d done. Most of the other girls would have swooned at Stoick’s feet. Valka looked at him coldly with her thin lips pressed whitely together. 

“Oh,” she’d said softly, “it’s some great thing you’ve done. Killing a dragon.”

Stoick had stood there, and Gobber had watched Stoick watching her go. “See,” Gobber had said, “that’s what happens when you don’t listen to me.”

“Gobber,” Stoick had said, still looking after Valka. She was distant then and had broken into a run along the path leading up to Dragon’s Watch, the great cliff that looked over the bay.

“Aye?” Gobber’d said.

“Shut up.”

If they’d either of them thought of the Terror she had tried so to nurse, perhaps it wouldn’t have taken Stoick another year and half of a second to show Valka he was capable of more than hitting things until they died. 

“If she’d more time,” said Gobber, thinking at last of the Terror with the broken wing that had bloodied Spitelout’s bum, “she might have ended the war then.”

But a fantasy, he revised. The raids had started in earnest that year, and it was that winter that the Jorgenson clan had lost three. Stoick’s elder sister was carried off in the summer by a Gronckle. 

Stoick agreed with the revision: “She could have had all the time any man can have and she still wouldn’t have changed us. Tamed all the dragons and we wouldn’t have listened.”

Hiccup was frowning as he turned over a length of wood in his hands. His hair was in his face. That long, he ought to pull it back, lest it get in his eyes while he was working at the anvil.

“He tamed the Night Fury,” Stoick said. He turned to Gobber and cut at the air with his hand. “A Night Fury! And we didn’t listen. Not till we all almost died at Helheim’s Gate did it make any difference.”

How the mountain had rent as the Red Death shouldered through the rock! That roar, so deep it rattled in the chest. His bones had clenched. We should have listened to the boy, Gobber had thought; then he’d thought: well, that’s it, then. A good thing the lad hadn’t taken kindly to being ignored and come after them. 

“Well,” said Gobber, “she might have created a dragon army and deposed your father, made her self chief. Commanded us all get along. After getting rid of the dunderheads like you.”

Stoick raised his brow. “Val?”

“I said ‘might.’ Pay closer attention to my grammatical choices.” Gobber tsked. “Old dunderhead.”

“Do you remember what she did after Old Wrinkly killed the Terror?” Stoick demanded. “She ran away and lived in the woods for a week.”

Oh, he did remember that now it was mentioned. “And you blamed Spitelout for it all,” Gobber said slowly, “and he kept crying to me about it. Why’d you bring this up? Now I want to strangle Spitelout. Have you any idea how hard it is strangling a man with one hand?”

Stoick glanced again at the boy. The bruises circling his throat had gone a faint and mottled green. Soon they would fade away entirely. The old blood cleaned out, the vessels healed. Already his voice was back to its usual radiant, nasal pitch. Gobber stroked at his mustache, to cover his grimace.

“Stoick,” he said, “I wasn’t thinking. You know me. Mouth faster than my legs.”

“I do know you,” Stoick said, and he gave Gobber an unsmiling look that nevertheless eased. He gestured with his finger. Gobber looked down, following the motion: Stoick had indicated Gobber’s peg. “I wasn’t thinking much either.”

Gobber snorted. “Fine parents we’ve made for Hiccup.”

At this, Stoick barked a laugh. “Aye,” he said, “between the two of us we’ve made a decent father.”

“And he’s only lost the one leg,” Gobber said.

Stoick grimaced then. “That leg.”

Hiccup interrupted: “Gobber, what…” He held up two of the raw wheels in one hand and that hefty length of timber in the other. His lips were pulled back to show his unclenched teeth; he squinted with all the rest of his face. “What is this? Wha—what am I supposed to do with this junk? Did you just dump the forge’s waste bin into your bag?”

“While you work on your apology,” Gobber said sidelong to Stoick, “I’ll entertain the boy.” Then he mouthed ‘leg’ and tipped his eyebrows significantly.

“You nag like a fishwife,” Stoick muttered.

“And I smell as lovely, true,” said Gobber, then he mouthed G-E-T.

“I mean,” Hiccup was saying, “this looks like you just threw a bunch of scrap in.”

Though he looked as though he meant to chastise Gobber for his presumption, Stoick merely gave Gobber the evil eye and went for the stairs. After years of friendship, Gobber had earned a right to presumption. He took it rather seriously.

“ Did you not see the plans I packed you?”

“What plans?” Hiccup rooted in the bag and freed the folded parchment. “You mean this illegible whatever it is?”

Gobber thumped over to the bed and ripped the paper from Hiccup’s hand. Hiccup tried not to grin; he surely did.

“Plans,” Gobber dragged it out. He rattled the parchment in Hiccup’s face. If he caught the lad’s nose, then so be it.

Hiccup snatched the paper back. “It’s just a drawing of a wheelbarrow. Not even a good drawing, if you ask me.”

“I didn’t,” said Gobber. He nodded at the paper. “I thought you might could work something out of it. You know how my pap used a barrow to wheel his self around after he lost both his legs at the hip.”

“You want me to sit in a wheelbarrow and push myself around to go places? That’s dignified.”

“You’re going to have to figure something out if you want to be out and about while your stump’s still healing,” Gobber said. “That walking stick—” Now he nodded toward that, set on the far side of the bed, against the wall. “It’s not really dramatic enough for you.”

Hiccup was considering the wheels. Neither sanded nor fitted, and without bored holes in the center, they were just thick discs.

“You’re not patronizing me,” he said absently, “just to keep me busy inside.”

“Who, me?” said Gobber. He picked at his eyebrow. “Never. And anyway, whatever I made you, you’d just improve on it and toss the original away like so much scrap.”

“It was a good leg,” Hiccup said guiltily.

Gobber shrugged. “It doesn’t bother me. You’ve a knack for fixing things up better than they were in the first place. Me, I just fix things.”

The lad rubbed his thumb along the wheel’s curve.

“Careful of splinters,” Gobber said, but the boy ran his thumb with the grain rather than against it.

“Well. If I do have a knack,” Hiccup said, “I learned it from you. So.”

Gobber looked at Hiccup looking down at the wheel. Such a warmth in Gobber’s breast, a great fondness. It hadn’t been there the night he saw the chief’s house burning and run to find Stoick shouting Valka’s name and holding her babe in his arm. Nor had he known this fondness the day Stoick brought the boy to the forge and declared him apprenticed to Gobber. That had come over a shock. Gobber would never have a child of his blood. Well, what need had he for a child of his blood?

“You’re a good lad,” said Gobber. He ruffled the boy’s hair. 

Hiccup swatted at him and frowned. He fingered his hair, as if to comb it; as though Gobber had made a mess of it.

“I guess if I put my weight on my knee,” he said, “and not the stump…” He glanced at the parchment. “Balance would be an issue. And control. And you’d want it to stay under you instead of slipping out.”

Gobber went to fetch a chair. Dropping it beside the bed, he then dropped onto the chair. Hiccup was gnawing on his lip.

“You could use a belt to keep it in place,” Gobber pointed out.

“Then when the wheel does slip, I’ll definitely go down with it.”

“You’d do that with the peg leg on you, too.” Gobber tapped his own knee. “I’ve done it myself enough.”

“And if I needed to go left,” Hiccup said, “I’d have to pick the wheel up and put it down again without falling on my head.”

Gobber made to take the discs from Hiccup. “Well, if you don’t want to give it a shot.”

“I didn’t say I didn’t want to give it a shot,” Hiccup said, holding the discs away.

“Then quit all your nay-saying.”

“That’s not nay-saying. It’s just, I need to figure out all the variables first,” Hiccup said, “ _before_ I start wasting materials.”

“I can always get you more of that junk from the waste bin,” Gobber joked. He eased against the chair’s back. “The storm’s nearly passed.”

Hiccup was fiddling with the discs. His gaze flicked toward the door then back to his hands. A thought occurred to Gobber. He plucked at his eyebrow again. He hadn’t Stoick’s control. His smile would not be contained.

“Just another day or two,” he said. “Then the snow will be on its way. And once the snow’s gone on you’ll be expecting visitors.” Slyly he watched as Hiccup reddened so his freckles faded into the flush. “Maybe it’s just the one visitor you’re expecting.”

Hiccup picked a splinter out of the wood. Flicking the splinter to the floor, he regarded Gobber. “Very subtle.”

Gobber snickered. “You know, you and your father, you’re not so different as you might think.” Hiccup only looked puzzled. Of course, he hadn’t heard Gobber and Stoick’s conversation. The joke would take too long to explain. He decided instead on another truth. 

“Your father got his head cracked when he was about sixteen,” Gobber said.

“Is this going somewhere?” Hiccup looked suspiciously at Gobber. “Like, is this another one of your weird moral lessons?”

“Will you shut up?”

He waited to see what else Hiccup might say, but Hiccup said nothing. Gobber cleared his throat and beat his fist to his chest. Hacking, he turned and spat phlegm to the fire.

“Don’t do that,” Hiccup said, appalled.

“Oh, next time I’ll aim for the floor then.”

“You’re not going to do it next time.”

“Cracked his head,” said Gobber loudly, “and near to died.”

“Just swallow it—”

“I’m not swallowing the stuff!” said Gobber. “Now shut your yapper and let me tell you the story!” 

Hiccup made a face but he let Gobber go on.

“As I was saying. Cracked his head—” 

Hiccup looked as though he struggled not to say something at this, likely that Gobber had said that already, and was there really any more to the story? Gobber fixed him with a proper glare, the sort his own dear ma had liked for skewering rascals. As rascals went, Hiccup didn’t look the type, but he’d a bull head and a need to get the last word in that landed him rightly in the category. On this occasion, Hiccup managed to allow Gobber a few more words.

“Cracked his head on the hull of a ship,” Gobber said. “Not the most heroic fear. He stepped in a puddle and whoop!” Gobber mimed one hand slipping off the other. “Broke his fall on his noggin. Broke his noggin, too. He was out for a couple of days and when he finally came to again, do you think he was grateful to see my handsome face?”

Hiccup opened his mouth.

“No,” said Gobber, “he was not. He had some fantasy of Valka coming to sit by his bedside and cry because she’d nearly lost him.” Gobber snorted. “At the time, there was no real thing between them. No, ah, understanding, if you get my drift. They weren’t sworn to one another, is what I mean.”

“I got that,” said Hiccup.

“Would you like some water?” Gobber asked. “For your dry mouth?”

The boy laughed. Smiling, he said, “So they weren’t engaged.”

“As a matter of fact, if I’m remembering it right,” Gobber said, squinting at the far wall, “Valka had made a pledge to her father—your grandda, that’d be—that she’d never marry again.”

“Again?” Hiccup blurted. He stared at Gobber. “She was married before Dad?”

Gobber stared right back at Hiccup. He lifted his chin from his hand. “What, he never told you? Some hotshot up in Freezing-To-Death, I don’t know the name.”

Hiccup’s gaze shifted from Gobber to a point left and far behind his shoulder. “You never said Mom was married to someone else.”

Stoick set the leg down at the foot of the bed, propped so it stood upright. “Did I not?”

“I would have remembered if you did!”

The boy’s Terror, Sharpshot, skittered out from under the stairs and made for the leg. Stoick shooed it away before it stole the limb as a toy. Hoisting the leg again, he looked about for a safer place to rest it: a likely excuse, Gobber thought. He just didn’t want to have to talk about this.

“It can’t be a pleasant memory for Stoick,” Gobber said, with gravity. “You’ll never have seen a more heartbroken nine year old than the wee Stoick at Valka’s wedding.”

Stoick hefted the leg to beat Gobber with it. Gobber hooted and held up his arm to take the blow that Stoick never gave.

“But she came back,” Hiccup said, “to Berk?” He looked in fascination from Gobber to his father. 

“Well, it’s more your father’s story than it is mine. More Valka’s than his,” Gobber said, “but—well.”

Stoick shouldered the leg. He pivoted on his heel. His broad back faced them.

“Come on, Stoick,” Gobber pressed. “The boy deserves to hear it from you. And who knows, it might put him at ease with regards to his own romantic travails.”

Hiccup said, “Gobber!” in a furious undertone. 

“Oh, what?” Gobber whispered. “The whole village knows about it. You two carrying on like a pair of… What you need is a good kick in the pants.”

“There’s nothing to tell,” said Stoick. He settled for putting the leg on the dinner table. “He died at sea, and since they had no children, she returned to her father’s house.”

“And you should have seen his face when he heard Valka was coming back,” Gobber said. “I think he really did fancy him self in love with her.”

“I _was_ in love with her,” said Stoick grimly.

“No nine year old is in love,” Gobber scoffed. “You said it yourself, didn’t you? Puppy love. That’s what it was.”

“Puppy love!” said Stoick. He looked to the ceiling and laughed; he looked to the wall and laughed again. “I—puppy love!” He ran his hand over his head and gave that laugh a third go. It remained thoroughly unconvincing.

Hiccup sidled closer to the side of the bed. He swung his legs over and propped his hands on the edge, so that he could lean forward. Very conspiratorial, this. Gobber rubbed his hand gleefully on his trouser leg and leaned in toward Hiccup.

“I went to ask if he’d heard the news from Spitelout, and when I told him, he stopped right where he was and he stared at the wall, like as if a man had walked over the place where he was to be buried, and he said—”

“You think I’m to be buried?” Stoick demanded, with all the scorn of someone who knew a funeral pyre was owed them.

Hiccup paid him even less heed than Gobber. “What did he say?”

“‘No matter,’” Gobber said, “‘it was only puppy love.’”

Stoick whacked Gobber on the shoulder. “My voice isn’t so high.”

Considering both Stoick and Gobber, Hiccup cleared his throat. His fist was at his mouth; he lowered it.

“‘No matter,’” said Hiccup gruffly, “‘it was only puppy love,’” and Gobber about fell out of his chair at how purple Stoick went in the face.

“Aye! Just like that!”

“Glad this amuses you,” Stoick snapped at Gobber. “You weren’t so amused when Spitelout married.”

Gobber shuddered. “No, I was too busy getting drunk off my arse so I could forget I’d ever thought of him. Spitelout! What was I thinking?”

“Spitelout?” Hiccup echoed. His face curdled.

“I was young,” Gobber said, “and flush with the passion of youth, and we’re not talking about me, we’re talking about you. Your dad. Shut it!”

Hiccup laughed again. Leaping onto the bed, Sharpshot twittered and curled up next to Hiccup’s leg. Still grinning, Hiccup petted the Terror.

“So? Did she?”

“What?” asked Stoick.

“Who?” asked Gobber.

Hiccup glanced, exasperated, at them both. “Did Mom visit him?”

“Ah,” said Gobber, and he looked to Stoick.

Stoick watched the Terror a moment. The dragon had set his chin on Hiccup’s knee. Sharpshot’s eyes were luminous and keen, Hiccup’s more so.

“She did,” said Stoick. His mouth moved. His beard a thick shield. 

Hiccup waited, thin face turned up to his father in anticipation. More like to Stoick than either of them thought, aye, but there were times when even Gobber saw Valka strongest in Hiccup. 

“And?”

And: Stoick did smile. “She chastised me for a fool. Swore if I ever did something so clumsy again she’d break my head herself and see if that would teach me to pay better attention to what I was doing with my fool feet. Then she accused me of being dramatic.”

“And a month later they were wed,” said Gobber brightly.

“Four months later.”

Gobber canted his hand. “Eh, four of one, half dozen the other.”

“I don’t think that’s how it goes.” The smile somewhat undercut Hiccup’s tone.

“I’ll tell you what I think,” said Gobber, but that was when the howling started: a racket so grating that Gobber nearly bit his tongue off as he hopped to his feet. It was his ma he thought of, and her tales of wintry demons, ghosts that fetched men to the underworld as punishment for their sins. Then the scratching started; whatever was out there scrabbled violently at the door.

Gobber looked about to find Hiccup sighing and patting Sharpshot on the head. The Terror blinked at Gobber. Stoick had taken to his name: a compelling tableau of disinterest.

“Well, don’t everyone jump up at once!” Gobber said.

“It’s just Toothless,” Hiccup said. He scratched at his knee and glanced at Stoick. “He’s ready to come back in.”

Grumbling, Stoick went to let the dragon in from the cold. Gobber tapped at his breast to make sure his heart was still beating and, if it had stopped, to see it started. 

“I thought it my ma’s spirit come for me at last.”

Hiccup wrinkled his nose. “Why would your mother want to drag you to Hel?”

“She wanted grandchildren,” Gobber said.

Hiccup’s face cleared. Stoick opened the door and then wedged himself in the frame, to block Toothless from bolting inside. Toothless braked and piled up against Stoick; the underside of his chin flashed as Toothless frantically threw his head back. He whined loudly.

“Shake off the snow,” Stoick growled. “I won’t have you leaving puddles around the house again.”

Gobber clucked. “Memories of that broken head.”

“So,” Hiccup said as Toothless wriggled obediently, showering Stoick with snow. “Spitelout?”

“We’ve all made mistakes,” Gobber said. “Let’s not even mention some of the things _he_ did trying to get Valka to stop seeing him as a boy.” He jerked his thumb toward Stoick, who was swiping the snow from his face.

“Contrary devil!”

The scene ought to have made Hiccup laugh. Rather, he looked to his knees. The hand resting on Sharpshot’s back wandered absently, his fingers not petting but drifting. To be young again, thought Gobber wryly, and certain that love was the heart of the world.

“You needn’t worry about Astrid,” Gobber said to Hiccup.

The boy flushed and hitched his shoulders, but he didn’t deny it. Too late for that, anyway. Gobber picked at his mustache and continued:

“It’s hard loving someone when you aren’t sure if they love you back. But you can’t force her to love you if she doesn’t.”

Irritably Hiccup said, “I know that.”

Gobber considered the boy. He’d grown tall over the last year, tall like a weed. His lip pushed out. Perhaps nothing Gobber said or did could illuminate or ease whatever burden Hiccup had made his self. That was the burden of a parent, to want to take that on. 

What a loss, Gobber had thought that night the chief’s house had burned to the ground, Valka gone. He’d lost his own dear ma when he was thirteen, old enough at least to remember her voice, her looks; the smell of her hair. Just a babe, Hiccup. Any knowledge of Valka he carried was surely buried deeper than memory. It wasn’t right for a child to lose a mother like that. Stoick did the best he could, and Gobber took care of the rest, but there were things Gobber had never thought he’d have to teach a child, like how to let go of loving. You prayed to Freyja that you’d never have a need for teaching it but even the gods could not command a person’s heart. The boy had turned out all right.

“Aye,” said Gobber, “I thought you might.” He tousled Hiccup’s hair.

“Gobber!” Hiccup batted his hands away. Scowling, he smoothed his hair, in as much as any mortal could do such a thing with the lad’s devotion to maintaining a rat’s nest.

He left the lad his illusions of maturity. “But I don’t think you have cause to worry too much,” Gobber added. “She’s been sneaking looks at you for years. Don’t tell me you never saw her doing it,” he said at Hiccup’s confusion, “she was always scowling at you and telling the others off for picking on you.”

“She just doesn’t like bullies,” Hiccup said, but he had that look to him, as if he were puzzling through something. So like the lad to be so caught up in his own head to miss things right in front of him. 

She’d come four times to see Hiccup as he lay fevered in bed after losing the leg; but of course he would remember none of that. A year before all the hullabaloo with Toothless and the dragon’s nest, Hiccup had insulted Snotlout one too many times. The twins had goaded him on, and Fishlegs had watched with interest, but it was Astrid was who had pulled Snotlout off the lad as Gobber was coming out to see what the fuss was about. Hiccup had scrambled to his feet while Astrid thumped Snotlout on his noggin.

“Are you all right?” she’d asked.

Hiccup cradled his nose. “I’m fine,” he muttered. “Great. Thank you.”

Too embarrassed to look her in the face, Hiccup had missed the real concern there. Gobber, chief witness, saw it. He saw, too, how Astrid squashed it: she frowned and said, “Next time save everyone the trouble and don’t call Snotlout an idiot unless you know how to defend yourself.”

“If it makes you feel any better,” Gobber said, thinking of Astrid scowling as Hiccup thanked the dirt at her feet, “I don’t think she much liked that she kept catching her self looking at you.”

Hiccup squinted his right eye: his cheek rounded; his mouth pulled to one side. 

“You’re right,” he said. “That does make me feel better.”

“Don’t take it personally.” Gobber patted his shoulder companionably. “She had a lot on her mind. The Hofferson legacy—remember that? And she’s been whacking the boys over the head since she was ten. There’s a good chance she made up her mind early that she’d rather take a knife to the chest than give anyone a kiss.”

Stoick had at last deemed Toothless clean enough to enter the house. The Night Fury bounded past him, knocking Stoick a step back in his eager rush to reunite with Hiccup. He bounced around the room; his tail swept all the knick-knacks from a shelf. Then he was crowding Hiccup, demanding his attention: he pawed at the boy and chattered at him and glowered at Sharpshot, who refused to vacate his warm spot next to Hiccup’s leg.

In all that commotion Hiccup said, “She’s kissed _me_ a couple times,” in a low voice. He rubbed Toothless’ nose. The dragon’s eyes slitted. He panted happily.

“See?” said Gobber. “Nothing to worry about. Not on that front.”

Hiccup nodded, but there was little to his expression that suggested he believed Gobber. His lips, compressed, were pale. His brow creased. Turning his face suddenly from Gobber, he rested his cheek on Toothless’ nose, startling Toothless. 

Stoick had closed the door. He lingered there, his hand on it. Gobber met his gaze: the chief shook his head. It was Astrid’s heart that most concerned Hiccup, but it was something else that concerned Gobber. Not yet, Stoick had said. They couldn’t keep it from him forever, but Astrid more than Hiccup deserved to be told. If she didn’t come to visit Hiccup after the storm’s passing, then they would have to visit her. 

Gobber returned to Hiccup. The boy had drawn his right leg up to the bed, his knee bent, so that he could better embrace Toothless. Upended, Sharpshot skulked on the pillows. The unbuttoned flaps of the trousers’ left leg had slipped from that knee to cover Hiccup’s stump, dangling still off the edge of the bed. She would visit; aye. 

Well, Gobber thought, and who was he to tell the boy he was wrong to worry of one thing rather than another? Time was he could look at Spitelout and see the pig-headed loudmouth as he used to when they were but teenagers themselves, something of a bittersweet memory that overlaid the now. Let Hiccup try and sort things out with Astrid before the spring. The boy ought to have that much. Astrid ought to have that much. Puppy love, he could call it, but Gobber hadn’t yet forgotten how Stoick had looked at Valka as she stepped off the boat and onto Berk soil again. Some illnesses passed with time. Others lingered.

“Suppose we should take those stitches out,” said Gobber, “and then we’ll be done with the unpleasant business.”

Stoick got a knife and handed it to Gobber. Gobber, straightening to take it, stopped short. He glanced right-wards. Hiccup had stuck his hand out for the knife. Nearly caught Gobber’s nose between his fingers, too.

“I know how to do it.”

The chief held the knife. Then he turned it around so he pinched the blade between finger and thumb. He offered the handle to Hiccup.

“Ooo,” said Gobber, “we’re independent now.” He eased back into the chair.

Hiccup wriggled his mouth at Gobber. He cut each knot and tugged the threads from his skin. Little puckered holes dotted the stump. He laid each thread out neatly beside its fellows. Stooping to sniff, Toothless exhaled and sent the threads scattering to the floor. 

“Toothless!”

Stoick, too, had stooped. His thumb was at his beard. 

“It does look well,” he said. Quickly he preempted Hiccup: “But you’re still to stay off it.”

Hiccup rolled his eyes. His head tipped. “Here’s your knife back.”

“And you didn’t cut yourself at all,” said Gobber. He tousled Hiccup’s hair again. Gave him a good scruff, though he yelped at the scrubbing. “You’re doing fine by your self. All thanks to my expert guidance.”

“Your expert what now?”

Stoick’s lean grin showed. “I’m with the lad on this one.”

“You neither one of you can take a joke,” Gobber complained. “Unappreciated. That’s what I am.”

“That’s not true. Toothless appreciates you.” Hiccup scratched Toothless’ eye ridge. “Yeah, buddy. He let you out so you could pee.”

Toothless beamed at Gobber. His ear flaps wiggled. Hiccup laughed. It would turn out right, Gobber thought. 

“It’s the little things that mean the most,” Gobber told Toothless. “They’re what you remember on the cold nights.”

Stoick shifted. His arms folded. He gripped his elbows. He was as rock-like as ever he was: a man obdurate as the mountain legend (Gobber was certain) would one day claim had birthed him.

“Aye,” said Stoick.

They’d time enough to sort it all out. Time before spring. His ma had taught him to believe it true, that everything came out like how it was meant to, for good fortune or for ill. If the boy could laugh like this, then it would all of it turn out right in the end. Sure enough, it would, Gobber thought. In the end.

*

Across the archipelago, as the blizzard drifted further to sea where it would dwindle then dissipate, people dug their houses and their selves out of the snow. Even as this storm moved inexorably on toward its death, the northern islands saw signs promising another storm, though it was still taking shape. You needn’t see the signs to expect its coming. Boats yet at sea hurried to near harbors to claim the seasonal amnesty. Squabbles between the tribes would be suspended till the thaw, a relic of an earlier era when war was the presumed state of things. Perhaps this tasked the resources of individual islands but most of winter’s refugees were willing to work in exchange for security. 

A few boats remained at sea. One or two drifted silently across the waters, pulled along by huge and unseen currents. Their crews were lost. Through what machination of nature, no one would ever know, just as no one would ever know what had happened to those ships till years later the ocean streams carried them homeward and men peering into the fog would make signs to the gods for safety from those ghost ships. More than a few ships had sunk, and their crews made hearty meals for lean and hungry sharks, and the sharks made for hearty meals for lean and likewise hungry dragons.

While other ships drifted with the sea’s motion, and others settled on the silted sea bed, and some sought sanctuary far from home, one boat did return to the harbor that it had originally left. The sailors aboard had tackled the rowing in shifts during the dim-lit day and anchored during the sightless night, as the ocean rolled and the wind howled and white snow ate the dark. In this fashion they’d progressed, slowly and often without hope.

At the usual hour the shift changed, and an extra body roused to play look-out now that they’d light to see. The morning was bleak. Kjell huddled into her coat and hunched over the rail, burrowed but for her eyes. She had earned the honor of straining her eyes all morning because she was the one who had first spotted the incoming dragons. Fat lot of good it had done them. It would have been better for her if she hadn’t seen anything. In that case, she thought, she would be among those rowing. So. 

The day brightened. A joke. The sleet had stopped. The snow was thin. Still, the clouds were dark; they withheld the sun. She watched the distant curve where the grey sky and the grey sea were no longer distinct. Her eyes were unfocused. The day was clear enough to see far, but what was there to see other than this unchanging grey? The white of her breath. She could see that if they did not find harbor soon that the cold would kill the rest of them.

A thick stripe showed on the horizon. She blinked. The stripe remained. Fumbling in the folds of her coat, she stuck her fingers up through the collar to swipe at her eyes. Still: it remained. In thickness, position, length, it had not changed. It did not change. She stayed at the rail. The minutes moved unkindly. Twice she made to call out and twice she sealed her lips. If it was not home, she thought. If the snow had driven her mad, as it had driven others before her. 

The stripe did not grow larger over the five or six minutes she stood watching for it to grow, and it was this that convinced her. A large mass would not rapidly expand to fill the horizon, as an illusion, longed for, might; whatever was there was real. 

“Ingr,” she said. Her voice was small. She forced it out: “Ingr!”

The old man joined her at the prow. The tendons in his hands had tightened so that his fingers and thumbs were always curved. Useful for holding rope. Less useful for other things.

“Wanting your gloves back?” he asked. 

Kjell tapped his arm and pointed. “Look there.” 

Ingr squinted. She watched his lined face, her breath drifting sideways with the wind, toward the horizon. 

“Land,” he said.

“Witsless.”

He nodded.

She hunched her shoulders, so that she was nearly buried in her coat again. 

“Do we tell them?”

Ingr cast his eye on her. “They’ll go where I say to go.”

“If we go back—”

“We go.”

“They’ll put us in cells,” she burst. She’d presence of mind, at least, to speak lowly. “We’ll rot for what we did—”

“We should,” he said. “But who’s to say we weren’t forced by those no longer among us to the doing?”

A moment, for Kjell to work through this. When she came to the end of it, she looked sharply at Ingr. 

“You’d put that on them?”

“They’re already dead,” said the old man. “The dead stay dead. They got their pyre. We keep our heads and we’ll keep our heads.” Ingr hocked spit over the rail and laughed. “I’ll tell the rest. You can go down now.” He patted her shoulder. “Rest your eyes some.”

As Ingr cried out to the men rowing, Kjell lingered at the rail. A light snow dotted the sea. Each flake dissolved into the water, leaving no trace. Her bare hands were numb; she folded them into her armpits. Warmer below decks, perhaps, to sleep huddled with the people who were off shift for the day. She curled over the railing. Her eyelashes stung, as if frozen. The shadow on the horizon persisted. Kjell maintained her look-out.

So the lost longship returned to Witsless.


End file.
